Nights at the Circus
Angela Carter
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Angela Carter
Title page
Introduction
Part 1: London
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part 2: Petersburg
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part 3: Siberia
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Envoi
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
Wise Children
Non-fiction
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in
Cultural History
Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings
Expletives Deleted
Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings
Drama
Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays
The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works
Angela Carter
NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS
With an introduction by
Sarah Waters
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Introduction
My first encounter with the lush, extravagant universe of Angela Carter’s fiction came in 1984, when I was just eighteen. This was the year that Carter collaborated with Neil Jordan to produce the film The Company of Wolves. Quite by chance, I caught a radio programme promoting the film, and discussing Carter’s collection of rewritten fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, on which it was based. I’d had a taste for the Gothic since childhood. The idea of a book which seemed to mix Perrault and Grimm with Hammer Horror impressed me enormously. Carter’s name stuck in my mind and, on a trip to Cardiff soon after, I went into a bookshop and sought The Bloody Chamber out.
I was a bookish teenager and relatively well-read, but Carter’s writing was unlike anything I’d ever come across before: vivid, theatrical, full of dazzlingly rococo narrative swoops and a startling sexual bluntness. A few years later, studying The Bloody Chamber for a literature MA, I would appreciate more than ever the sophistications of Carter’s project, her engagement with the founding myths of Western culture, and with Freud and Lacan. But in the meantime, I simply read every bit of her writing I could lay my hands on. The Passion of New Eve and Heroes and Villains I discovered to be baroque apocalyptic fables, stories of sex-change, sorcery, the epic struggle between civilisation and chaos. The Magic Toyshop I read as a Gothic story of adolescent awakening, of pleasure and fear. The Sadeian Woman, a piece of cultural criticism, daringly recast the Marquis de Sade as a clear-sighted analyst of sexual relations, the feminist’s ‘unconscious ally’.
Nights at the Circus was published in the autumn of 1984, as I was starting life as an English student, too poor to afford a hardback. I bought the novel when it came out in paperback the following year and begged the university bookshop to give me the poster that had been sent out as part of the publicity campaign; and I stuck it to my college bedroom wall, as I might have pinned up other iconic ’80s images – the film poster for Betty Blue, or stickers saying ‘Coal Not Dole.’
I had to wait until 1991 for Carter’s next novel, the rambunctious Wise Children; this time, a girlfriend bought me the hardback as a birthday present. I had no idea that this would be Carter’s last work. I did not know that she was already becoming ill. This was years before I ever thought of writing myself, and the literary world was a closed and very distant one. I was familiar with a much-reproduced image of her, which showed an appealing-looking, handsome woman with strikingly high cheekbones and white hair, but I had never seen her speak or read from her work. Then, on a Sunday evening in the February of 1992, a friend rang me up to say that he had just heard on the radio that Angela Carter had died of lung cancer. We were both floored by the news – both, absurdly, as upset as if we’d known Carter personally; and both, with the sorrow of passionate readers, devastated at the loss of such a glorious literary talent.
Our reaction was, I suspect, far from unique. Carter’s literary reputation had been relatively slow to build; there had been a surge of popular interest in her work, at exactly the time I’d first heard of her, as a result of the release of Jordan’s film; but her audience, after that, remained a fiercely devoted one. And her writing had a particular resonance, I think, for women readers. Her theatrical, fabular style has much in common with that of the other great magic realists, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but she wrote, always, with a distinctly feminist agenda, determined to debunk cultural fantasies around sexuality, gender and class. She helped stimulate an excitement about feminist writing and feminist publishing (she was hugely supportive, for example, of the founding of the women’s publishing house Virago Press, in 1979), and many of her literary preoccupations – the challenging of the canon, the rewriting of fairy tale and myth, the imagining of female utopias and dystopias – lie at the heart of much feminist writing and thought from the 1970s and ’80s. But few other writers, female or male, had her imagination, her literary audacity, her confidence with language and idea. Few had her power to unsettle as well as to inspire and console.
Nights at the Circus is her masterpiece; it’s also the most engaging and accessible of her fictions. Her earliest novels tend towards the stylised; Nights, by contrast, is a sprawling, garrulous book, a picaresque story of Rabelaisian proportions, with a suitably larger-than-life heroine: Fevvers, the winged Victorian ‘Cockney Venus’, six feet two in her stockings, with a voice like clanging dustbin lids and a face as ‘broad and oval as a meat dish’. Fevvers’s extraordinary life-story – given in the for
m of an interview to a sceptical American journalist, Jack Walser, backstage at the Alhambra Music Hall – makes up the novel’s substantial Part One. After that, still in pursuit of his story, Walser signs up alongside Fevvers as a clown, and Parts Two and Three transport us, unexpectedly, to Imperial Russia; first to the barely controlled mayhem of the St Petersburg Circus and then to the dizzying white wastes of Siberia. As the landscape grows more extreme, so Carter pushes at the limits of the novel form itself. The cosy realist start expands, via fantasy and allegory, to open up a space for radical change. By the end of the book, personalities will have been reformed, social and gender dynamics rewritten, by – a wonderful phrase, which beautifully sums up Carter’s style and literary ethos – ‘the radiant shadow of the implausible’.
For Carter was, among many things, a fabulous storyteller, a professional liar, always revelling in narrative and its rude, primal pull. Nights at the Circus is full of stories, its basic structure regularly opening out to offer us the potted biographies of minor characters. There are Ma Nelson’s prostitutes, for example, who first discover Fevvers, newly hatched and abandoned, in a basket on the doorstep of their Whitechapel brothel. There are the inhabitants of the Museum of Women Monsters – Fanny Four-Eyes, the Wiltshire Wonder, and others – with whom Fevvers briefly throws in her fortunes once the brothel is disbanded. There are the artistes of the Imperial Circus: Mignon, the Ape-Man’s abused missus; the tiger-taming Abyssinian Princess; and Buffo the Clown, who loses his wits mid-performance and is carted off to an asylum – much to the delight of the unsuspecting crowd, for whom it’s all part of the craziness of the ring. These characters’ stories erupt like fantastic blossoms out of the already gaudy foliage of Carter’s narrative, pushing it in wild, surprising directions but never throwing it off balance or weighing it down.
The novel treads a similarly agile path between realism and fantasy. Its historical setting, for example, is a very specific and meaningful one – the action takes place at the ‘fag-end’ of the 1890s, and Fevvers is utterly a woman of her time, a woman who’s been painted by Lautrec, had supper with Willy and Colette, troubled the psychoanalysts of Vienna, and been courted by the Prince of Wales. The outrageous name-dropping becomes more sly and more exuberant as the novel proceeds. Carter’s pen trips with wonderful breeziness through the Western literary canon, offering us echoes of Goethe, Shakespeare, Poe, Swift, Baudelaire, Mozart and Blake; but giving nods, too, to Yeats, Laurel and Hardy, Foucault, and – ‘They’re a girl’s best friend,’ twinkles Fevvers at one point, displaying her diamond earrings – Anita Loos. As these flagrant anachronisms hint – and as Carter makes explicit once we reach the ‘Sleeping Beauty of a city’ that is fin de siècle St Petersburg, soon to be awakened by the ‘bloody kiss’ of revolution – Nights at the Circus does not belong to ‘authentic history’. It offers, instead, a kind of fantasy history, weaving its stories in and across the gaps, silences and pregnant shadows of recorded fact.
It’s a tribute to Carter’s skill as a novelist that her characters can inhabit this gloriously artificial universe and yet remain so emotionally compelling and physically convincing. Even Fevvers’s feathers convince us. Carter clearly gave them an awful lot of thought – ‘Really,’ she once said, in interview, ‘how very, very inconvenient it would be for a person to have real wings, just how really difficult’ – and I’ve always been tickled by the attention she gives to Fevvers’s aerodynamics, the detail into which Fevvers goes when explaining to Walser her awesome but inconvenient physique:
My legs don’t tally with the upper part of my body from the point of view of pure aesthetics, d’you see. Were I to be the true copy of Venus, one built on my scale ought to have legs like tree-trunks, sir; these flimsy little underpinnings of mine have more than once buckled up under the top-heavy distribution of weight upon my torso, have let me down with a bump and left me sprawling. I’m not tip-top where walking is concerned, sir, more tip-up.
Fevvers is a wonderfully fleshly creation, a creature of sweats and appetites, of belches and farts. Her predicament – like that of many charismatic women (like Wedekind’s Lulu, for example, about whom Carter would write a stage play in 1987) – is that she is continually preyed upon by people seeking to turn her into a commodity or a symbol. She narrowly escapes being ritually sacrificed by the sinister Mr Rosencreutz, who sees her as ‘Flora; Azrael; Venus Pandemos!’. She is almost turned into a literal ‘bird in a gilded cage’ by a Russian Grand Duke. Just as Walser, ‘unfinished’ at the novel’s start, must be remade, reformed, via amnesia and cultural displacement, so Fevvers has to learn how to tell her own story, on her own terms: to become ‘No Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel’, but the agent of her own imagination and her own desire. For only then will she become a symbol really worth celebrating – a symbol of the new century which, significantly, is just breaking at the novel’s close, a century in which (with a bit of luck) ‘all the women will have wings’.
Carter was committed to telling tales of transformation throughout her career; in The Bloody Chamber, women are transformed into beasts, beasts are changed into men, in allegories of power and desire. Like all her fictions, Nights at the Circus has its share of villians and victims, female and male, but the narrative ultimately celebrates liberation, the casting off of myth and mind forg’d manacles, the discovery of voice, empathy, conscience, the making of a ‘new kind of music’. The novel ends with Fevvers’s laughter, with an affirmation of life. And Carter’s very prose is something to smile at, teeming as it does with memorable images, metaphors and similes. A drawing-room, for example, is ‘snug as a groin’. A woman ‘crackle[s] quietly with her own static’. A sky is ‘tinted the lavender of half-mourning’, a violet is ‘the colour of tired eyelids’, a tiger moves ‘like orange quicksilver, or a rarer liquid metal, a quickgold’. Carter’s writing, not just in this novel but throughout her work, is a celebration of words – a celebration of language and all the marvellous things that language can be made to do.
It’s this combination of lushness and tremendous optimism, I think, which made Nights at the Circus so memorable for so many readers in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s; and it’s something which renders the novel inspiring today, in a different political climate but at a time when much British fiction seems to affect an affectless style, and to be interested in themes of failure, decay, and disappointment. Like all thoughtful novelists, Carter engaged very explicitly with the issues of her day. Her account of the Imperial Circus was written in a period when St Petersburg had been reborn twice, as Petrograd and Leningrad, but before its original name had been restored to it; and in a world in which Nike – the Winged Victory whom Fevvers impersonates at the Whitechapel brothel – was still a relatively innocent motif. One can’t help but wonder what Carter would have made of post-Communist politics, globalisation, New Labour, the invasion of Iraq, and – because one of her strengths, I think, was her promiscuous plundering of popular culture as well as the canon – it’s impossible not to regret the rich and irreverent fictions she might have woven out of reality TV, the cult of celebrity, cosmetic surgery, and ASBOs. She was one of the great late twentieth-century British writers, producing novels, short stories, journalism and plays that spoke to a shared cultural climate, but in a style that was entirely her own. She was also enormously influential. Rereading Nights at the Circus for this reissue, in fact, I could see, in a rich, original form, many of the themes and preoccupations that have surfaced in my own work. I could never have written the novels that I have without having read the fictions of Angela Carter first. I’m still sorry that I shall never get to meet her, and thank her.
Sarah Waters, 2006
1
LONDON
ONE
‘Lor’ love you, sir!’ Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why, I first saw light of day right here in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed the “Cockney Venus�
, for nothing, sir, though they could just as well âave called me âHelen of the High Wireâ, due to the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore â for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched.
âHatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang, as ever is!â
The blonde guffawed uproariously, slapped the marbly thigh on which her wrap fell open and flashed a pair of vast, blue, indecorous eyes at the young reporter with his open notebook and his poised pencil, as if to dare him: âBelieve it or not!â Then she spun round on her swivelling dressing-stool â it was a plush-topped, backless piano stool, lifted from the rehearsal room â and confronted herself with a grin in the mirror as she ripped six inches of false lash from her left eyelid with an incisive gesture and a small, explosive, rasping sound.
Fevvers, the most famous aerialiste of the day; her slogan, âIs she fact or is she fiction?â And she didnât let you forget it for a minute; this query, in the French language, in foot-high letters, blazed forth from a wall-size poster, souvenir of her Parisian triumphs, dominating her London dressing-room. Something hectic, something fittingly impetuous and dashing about that poster, the preposterous depiction of a young woman shooting up like a rocket, whee! in a burst of agitated sawdust towards an unseen trapeze somewhere above in the wooden heavens of the Cirque dâHiver. The artist had chosen to depict her ascent from behind â bums aloft, you might say; up she goes, in a steatopygous perspective, shaking out about her those tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl as she. And she was a big girl.
Evidently this Helen took after her putative father, the swan, around the shoulder parts.
But these notorious and much-debated wings, the source of her fame, were stowed away for the night under the soiled quilting of her baby-blue satin dressing-gown, where they made an uncomfortable-looking pair of bulges, shuddering the surface of the taut fabric from time to time as if desirous of breaking loose. (âHow does she do that?â pondered the reporter.)
