Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 26

There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: ‘Where was I before I was born?’

In the beginning was … what?

Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders …

Angela Carter, ‘The Curious Room’, SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature), 1990

She cultivated the role of fairy godmother and/or witch, and – in The Bloody Chamber (1979) – rewrote the Bluebeard story with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute. However, it was not her own mother, one of a family of ‘great examination-passers’ (a scholarship girl who’d left school at fifteen to work at Selfridges) who provided the model for this kind of figure, but her maternal grandmother, who’d come originally from South Yorkshire. Granny came to the rescue in the year of Angela’s birth (1940) and evacuated herself and her grandchildren from south London back to the gritty coal-mining village of Wath-upon-Dearne, kidnapping them safely into the past for the duration of the war.

Skipping a generation took Angela back to ‘Votes for Women’, working-class radicalism, outside lavatories and coal-dust coughs. Granny ought, perhaps, to have surfaced in the fiction as the spirit of social realism, though actually it makes sense that she’s in the magical mode, since her brand of eccentric toughness was already thoroughly archaic from the point of view of the post-war and the south of England. In Angela’s last novel, Wise Children, the granny-figure is killed in the Blitz, but bequeaths to her adoptive grand-daughters Dora and Nora the Brixton house that offers them a safe haven when they have to retire from the stage. ‘When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky … She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast,’ says Dora.

Grandma figures as the house in this book, the matriarchal space of the Carter house of fiction – ‘but the whole place never looked plausible’ (Dora again). In a New Review series on ‘Family Life’ back in 1976, Angela wrote that her grandmother ‘was a woman of such physical and spiritual heaviness she seemed to have been born with a greater degree of gravity than most people’.

Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially Saint Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand – my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt …

Grandmother is a larger-than-life ‘character’ for her – Leninist Lizzie, the heroine’s minder in Nights at the Circus, looks like another avatar – but mother is almost a missing person. Not unusual this, at all, particularly for daughters growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, with upwardly socially mobile mothers who’d given up work: women girlified, exiled and isolated in domesticity, who hadn’t ‘done anything’ with their education. She wrote about her Scottish journalist father with obvious pleasure: ‘very little to do with the stern, fearful face of the Father in patriarchy … there was no fear’ (‘Sugar Daddy’ in Fathers, Virago, 1983). Whereas about her mother, who was younger but died first, she was wry, oblique, regretful, protective: ‘There was to be no struggle for my mother, who married herself young to an adoring husband who indulged her, who was subject to ill-health, who spoke standard English, who continued to wear fancy clothes.’ Angela was supposed to do something with her own education, so instead of course she married young herself, in reaction against what her mother wanted for her, though it didn’t last long. If you look for the provenance of the feminist writer, mother is the key. The women who really nailed patriarchy weren’t on the whole the ones with authoritarian fathers, but the ones with troubled, contradictory mothers: you aim your feminism less at men than at the picture of the woman you don’t want to be, the enemy within. In this case, the girl-wife. Hence (again) a motive for skipping a generation, in imagination. Back to Gran.

It wasn’t a card she openly played until she got older, when she took to fairy tales and ribaldry. However, the whole camp quality of writing of the 1960s derives from this sense of a lost (deliberately distanced) reality: working-class, northern, matriarchal. None of this could she be, or speak directly for, but she could do it in pastiche – and she did, writing in ghostly quotation marks. If there was nearly nothing ‘natural’ about her style, this was perhaps because her kind of family background introduced her early on to the notion that the culture was a dressing-up box and to the bliss and nightmare of turning the clock back. That is what The Magic Toyshop (1967) is about – slipping out of your precarious middle-classness into the house of (superficial) horrors and (libidinal) mirrors. Ten years after that she said to me in an interview (I’d asked, ‘Do you think your environment shaped you?’):

Well, my brother and I speculate endlessly on this point. We often say to one another, How is it possible such camp little flowers as ourselves emanated from Balham via Wath-upon-Dearne and the places my father comes from, north Aberdeenshire, stark, bleak and apparently lugubriously Calvinistic, witch-burning country? But obviously, something in this peculiar rootless, upward, downward, sideways socially mobile family, living in twilight zones …

This is not about nostalgia but connects with a quite different contemporary sensation: of coming at the end, mopping up, having the freedom of anomie.

‘Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room …’ Crammed with wonders? The beginning, for Carter, is a magical lumber-room. Over the years her own south London house came rather to resemble this cabinet of curiosities. It was a toy-box long before her son Alexander arrived, though he completed its transformation so that there was hardly room to swing a cat. Indeed, the cats were eventually exiled to the garden. A letter she wrote to me just after that first 1977 interview records the beginnings of this process:

The NEW REVIEW piece is smashing. Thanks. The only snag, as far as I’m concerned, is that I only have the one script, alas, so that a number of the details of my autobiography are repeated in the ‘Family Life’ piece – repeated word for word, what’s more. Which is a great tribute to my internal consistency, I suppose; only, my childhood, boyhood and youth is a kind of cabaret turn performed, nowadays, with such a practised style it comes out engine-turned on demand. What a creep I am.

And I always get cast down by my own pusillanimity. The notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going. Of course, I have my own private lists prepared for the purges but … I’m more interested in socialist reconstruction after the revolution than the revolution itself, which seems to mark me out from my peers. We have just had the exterior of this house painted quite a jolly red, by the way. The front steps look as if the Valentine’s Day massacre had been performed on them. However, I also managed to persuade Christine downstairs to have a black front door so it is the jolly old red & black & VIVA LA MUERTE & sucks boo to Snoo’s barley and bamboos; we’re going to have a real Clapham front garden, the anarchist colours & pieces of motorcycle & broken bottles & used condoms lightly scattered over all …

PS I didn’t manage to post this until today, Sunday, or rather 00.30 Monday morning, after a brisk search for the letter (in Portuguese) inviting me to this ruddy do [a Festival of Free Art], which begins to look more and more like a nightmare. Chris [‘Christine downstairs’] wants me to bring home a 6 ft. ceramic cockerel. I have house-guests, just arrived, having driven from Nepal – the sister of a Korean ex-boyfriend of mine plus her bloke. Mark has strained a muscle in his back – I’d planned to have him push me around in my wheelchair in 20 years time; what if I have to push him around in one in 5 years time? It’s like a soap opera in this house, an everyday story of alternative folk, I suppose.

You can see in the discussion of the decor here something of her inverted dandyism; also the self-consciousness which was her inheritance, for better and for worse. The whole place ‘never looked plausible’.