Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings
Angela Carter
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Angela Carter
Title Page
Introduction
Author’s Introduction
TELL ME A STORY
1. Milorad Pavic: Dictionary of the Khazars
2. Milorad Pavic: Landscape Painted with Tea
3. Irish Folk Tales, Arab Folktales
4. Danilo Kis: The Encyclopedia of the Dead
5. John Berger: Pig Earth
6. John Berger: Once in Europa
7. The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm
8. Georges Bataille: Story of the Eye
9. William Burroughs: The Western Lands
10. William Burroughs: Ah Pook is Here
11. J. G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun
12. Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget
13. The Alchemy of the Word
TOMATO WOMAN
14. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine and other Dishes
15. Redcliffe Salaman: The History and Social Influence of the Potato
16. Food in Vogue
17. Elizabeth David: English Bread and Yeast Cookery
18. Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed
HOME
19. Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia
20. Ian Jack: Before the Oil Ran Out and others
21. Michael Moorcock: Mother London
22. Iain Sinclair: Downriver
AMERIKA
23. Robert Coover: A Night at the Movies
24. Hollywood
25. Edmund White: The Beautiful Room is Empty
26. Paul Theroux: My Secret History
27. Gilbert Hernandez: Duck Feet
28. Louise Erdrich: The Beet Queen
29. Grace Paley: The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
LA PETITE DIFFERENCE
30. Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
31. David Kunzle: Fashion and Fetishisms
32. Christina Stead
33. Phyllis Rose: Jazz Cleopatra
34. Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
35. Eric Rhode: On Birth and Madness
Envoi: Bloomsday
Notes
Copyright
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.
ALSO BY ANGELA CARTER
Short Stories
Fireworks
The Bloody Chamber
Black Venus
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)
The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)
Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (editor)
Novels
Shadow Dance
The Magic Toyshop
Several Perceptions
Heroes and Villains
Love
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
The Passion of New Eve
Nights at the Circus
Wise Children
Non-fiction
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise
in Cultural History
Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings
Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings
Drama
Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays
The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works
ANGELA CARTER
Expletives Deleted
Selected Writings
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Michael Moorcock
Introduction
Although we were near contemporaries, born a few months and a few miles apart, and were acquainted for some 25 years, Angela Carter and I did not become good friends until after my wife and I returned to London from Yorkshire in the early 1980s. Angie was especially kind to Linda, who, as an American, felt a bit excluded by many English people. The two women were natural sisters; they shared political views, were both outspoken, forthright, untricky, could swear like Tommy Atkins and were dramatically good-looking.
With Angie’s companion, Mark Pearce, we got on easily and well. Neither Mark nor Linda had much time for the literary demimonde and they helped Angie and me keep our feet on the ground. We all had strong likes and dislikes (not always the same). We relished many of the same activities. Mark was an archer, as I had been when younger, and taught their son Alex to shoot. Mark never wasted words and like Linda could say a great deal with a glance. Not making many literary friends at the best of times, I valued Angie’s friendship a lot.
Her instincts for special occasions were always exactly right. I’m looking now at the photograph of a seaside pierrot she gave me for my fiftieth birthday. It is one of the most fruitful images I have. She was very generous with her time in aid of a good cause. Her insights were always original and witty. She was one of the easiest companions to relax with. She could be a discreet and sensitive friend. Her gossip was never, ever treacherous, rarely malicious. If she attacked someone it was almost always directly and, like Linda, if she didn’t like you, you knew it pretty quickly. She had taught in the USA and had good stories about it. She also knew Japan well. She and Linda exchanged anecdotes of their experiences there.
As South Londoners Angie and I had a great deal in common. We had enjoyed the same enthusiasms as teenagers when folk music, blues, early rock and roll and science fiction all seemed to offer possibilities which the more conventional forms lacked. Because we were so frequently abroad, our early meetings had been intermittent, but it was comfortable to share the same memories of South London and recall childhood frustrations and hopes. She didn’t tell me she was writing one, but when I read her review of my novel Mother London in the Guardian (see chapter 21) I burst into tears, not because she had praised me but because it was another example of her generosity. We had in common a love of popular English culture – Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd and other stars of the music hall; Arthur Askey, Max Miller and Max Wall; Ealing comedies and those writers of working-class and lower middle-class comedies such as Gerald Kersh and Jack Trevor Story, whose talents and observations were rarely recognised by the literary world.
I especially liked Angie’s fiction of the 1980s as it moved from the fantastic to the extraordinary, still conveying the uniqueness of individuals and their experience. It seemed to me that she was entering an incredibly fruitful period in which she transferred her attention from, as it were, the alienated to the marginalised.
We were part of a small group of people who, for one reason or another, considered ourselves a bit outside the mainstream. Her other friends included Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, J.G. Ballard, Lorna Sage and, of course, Carmen Callil, publisher and co-founder of Virago – mostly people who, for various reasons, did not identify readily with the English
establishment and, indeed, did not always make easy relationships. All, however, were united in their friendship and concern for her.
In early 1991, while in California, I asked her if she’d like to contribute to an anthology version of New Worlds which was at that time being revived by my friend David Garnett. She had regretted not appearing in the original, so it struck me she would be a great addition to Garnett’s contents page. He was extremely enthusiastic. But after I wrote to her and asked her, I heard nothing. I was surprised, since she wasn’t normally given to embarrassed silences, but I assumed in this case that she hadn’t wanted to say no. The anthology went ahead without her.
After California, Linda and I continued on to Spain and did not return to England until August. The first issue of New Worlds was due to come out in the autumn. Amongst the letters waiting for me was one from Angie which I opened hoping she had decided to do something for the second number.
I still have the letter:
August Bank Holiday
The Chase,
London SW4
Dear Mike,
Seeing the ad. for ‘New Worlds’ prompted me to write and apologise for not replying to your letters, earlier this year. I am sorry, and even sorrier that I won’t be able to contribute a story to ‘New Worlds’ – though honoured to be asked . . .
Why beat about the bush. I had a diagnosis of cancer shortly before Easter, and the entire summer has been taken up with tests, and treatments, and now more tests. (It’s in the lung.) As a result, this house has been at sixes and sevens, somewhat, and most things not connected with daily living have gone by the board. It’s very difficult not to sound melodramatic, under the circumstances, but there we are. I’m not one of those people who can work through anything, unfortunately – I’ve been doing a little book reviewing, and stuff, and catching up on my reading. (All those books, you understand, that one always meant to read . . .)
What the hell. I feel reasonably chipper, in myself, as they say, and contrary to rumour, nothing hurts. If I think of a ‘New Worlds’-type idea, then I’ll be in touch, soonest. But, at the moment, I am bereft of any ideas at all – except, and plentifully, theories about current events in Russia, but those I share with my own paranoia, not with this typewriter, even.
We still have a plan to take you and Linda down the canal. Or, up the canal. Or, since the canal does not flow, I suppose I should say, along the canal, because it goes neither up nor down, like the Grand Old Duke of York.
Lots of love and to Linda. Your Angie.
I’m not sure any of us realised how little life she had left, but we began to see quite a lot of each other for the rest of that year. Linda and I had settled down in London. Linda would prepare easily transported food and we would take it over to Clapham to save Angie and Mark the trouble of cooking. I found her some hash, which could be eaten rather than smoked, since we had heard that cannabis helped offset the effects of chemotherapy. She thought it worked.
We didn’t dwell on the details of her treatments. Apart from the odd reference to hospitals and doctors, our friendship went on pretty much as it had done. We discussed issues of the day, our hatreds and our enthusiasms. I don’t think we were pretending that anything was normal. She was straightforward about her symptoms (‘Don’t worry,’ she’d say if she started coughing, ‘I’m not bringing up bits of lung.’). We never avoided the fact, but we didn’t tend to brood about it either. Soon she knew there was very little chance of her recovering from the cancer, which was advanced before her diagnosis. She began to hope for enough time to see friends and relatives and became primarily concerned for Mark and Alex.
Angie was confident that Mark would provide for them but she was worried about leaving some sort of inheritance for Alex. She found she could not easily take on new work once she knew she was going to die, so she concentrated on the material that was already published or about to be published. Carmen Callil was a great help and this collection of previously published literary journalism was one way in which Carmen was able to do something positive for her.
She had an eager curiosity about the world and a deep knowledge and understanding of the traditional English literary canon. She was, in my view, profoundly well-educated, like my other great friend, her acquaintance Andrea Dworkin, who also died far too soon, in her fifties. She and Angie had much in common, though the two were sometimes at odds, frequently interpreting feminism very differently, especially where the Marquis de Sade was concerned. As Andrea and other American radicals had done, Angie adopted the German spelling of America to describe the imperialist, bullying, unjust aspects of a nation which she felt had let her down.
The USA, as she happily admitted, had an enormous cultural influence on her. She admired the vigour and willingness to engage with important subjects which characterised American novelists. She had, in the main, enjoyed her time teaching in Austin, which remains one of the centres of US radicalism, but she could not condone the cynicism of the country’s foreign policy, its gunboat politics, its willingness to support dictatorships and to interfere, sometimes violently, with the governance of other sovereign states. Equally, she was highly critical of the policies of the Thatcher government. Some of that criticism can be found here.
She loved novels, as she says, especially unusual novels like those of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair or the unfairly sidelined Walter de la Mare. Her reviews of John Berger, Milorad Pavic, Grace Paley and others all lead to a better understanding and relish for their work. Angie was always a political animal. Even her literary enthusiasms were coloured by her strongly held principles and beliefs. She loved experiment as much as she loved traditional stories and as such was part of a movement which often instinctively rejected modernism. She created new models and conventions of narrative and subject matter as enthusiastically as she looked to old methods in folklore and legend. As what came to be called an early ‘magic realist’, she loved Eastern European, South American, Pakistani and other writers who emerged from national traditions rather than Western modernism.
For perhaps the same reasons she was attracted to romantics and surrealists, to visionaries, though in some ways she was too down-to-earth to be a fully-fledged romantic herself. Her work grew increasingly realistic as it matured and, in my view, was all the better for it. Those of us who had experienced an intensified childhood, as Ballard had in wartime Shanghai or, as she and I had, in blitzed London, found even those writers we admired lacking certain techniques which could readily describe that experience. Like me, she was born into a dangerous world, knowing the permanent possibility of sudden death. This was not easily dealt with in the tradition of Joyce, Woolf, Bowen or even Angus Wilson. The finer sensibilities cultivated and admired by the likes of F.R. Leavis seemed, if anything, rather inappropriate given the monumental events of her early life, including the Second World War, the Nazi holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. She didn’t seek sensation – far from it – but she did prefer work which described extremes, however calmly. She looked to writers who were either fascinated by intense experience or who sought to provide that experience with a fresh lexicon, and you will find in these pieces a tendency to be drawn to writers like Jarry, Kafka and Primo Levi, who remained, for a variety of reasons, on the outskirts looking in. She felt most comfortable in their company, even though her own career as a novelist, an academic and a journalist had been relatively conventional.
Angie had never cared about literary prizes or being fashionable but when her last and best novel, Wise Children, was shortlisted for the Daily Mail fiction prize she was told that she would only stand a chance of winning the fairly substantial cash award if she agreed to turn up for the ceremony, so she endured the smoke of the presentation dinner only to learn that she had not, after all, won. My agent, the late Giles Gordon, told me that at the last minute one of the judges voted against her merely because he didn’t like John Mortimer’s assumption that her book was certain to win. Like other dis
appointments, Angie took that one well, but the rest of us were furious at the people who had so thoughtlessly taxed her resources. That Christmas she went north to visit her organist brother and in February Linda and I went to Mexico. Angie spent the rest of the time left to her with close friends and relatives, enjoying their company, preparing this book. I heard about her death on the BBC World Service a short time later. It happened too suddenly. I wished that I had stayed in London and seen just a little more of her.
I never wanted to admit that Angie was gone. She was one of the few people whose good opinion I valued and I could scarcely grasp the idea that such a fount of energy, enthusiasm, generous friendship and fierce political passions was mortal, let alone that she was dead. Of course, she’s very much alive in her work and revisiting these pieces is rather like hearing her speak again – funny, opinionated, passionate, full of original insights. Those qualities of enthusiasm and generosity (except perhaps towards food journalists) radiate from this book.
As in her later novels, Angie made it her business to represent the outsider. She had a particular sympathy for writers who were in some way pushed to the margins by fashion, which is as powerful in the literary world as anywhere. Perhaps the best essay in this book is about Christina Stead, an Australian writer whose unique genius remained largely unacknowledged in her lifetime. Stead’s reputation has continued to grow since her death, thanks at least in part to Angie’s championing of her. In writing about Stead, Angie also reveals her own considerable understanding of her craft, her eclecticism, her own willingness to tackle unusual subjects in new and distinctive ways. Her work speaks for itself and remains a monument to a great woman, as well as a great writer, a fine artist with a brilliant, disciplined mind.
In her piece on Danilo Kis’s The Encyclopedia of the Dead she says: ‘Truth is always stranger than fiction because the human imagination is finite while the truth is not . . . Books don’t really have lives of their own. They are only as important as the ideas inside them. [Kis] is wise, grave, clever and complex. His is a book on the side of the angels.’ Though far too dismissive of her own insights, she might again be talking about her own work which reveals without doubt a woman decidedly on the side of the angels.
