planned her funeral carefully. My instructions were to read Marvell’s poem “On a Drop of Dew.” This was a surprise. The Angela I knew had always been the most scatologically irreligious, merrily godless of women; yet she wanted Marvell’s meditation on the immortal soul—“that Drop, that Ray / Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day”—spoken over her dead body. Was this a last surrealist joke, of the “thank God, I die an atheist” variety, or an obeisance to the metaphysician Marvell’s high symbolic language from a writer whose own favored language was also pitched high, and replete with symbols? It should be noted that no divinity makes an appearance in Marvell’s poem, except for “th’ Almighty Sun.” Perhaps Angela, always a giver of light, was asking us, at the end, to imagine her dissolving into the “glories” of that greater light: the artist becoming a part, simply, of art.
She was too individual, too fierce a writer to dissolve easily, however: by turns formal and outrageous, exotic and demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black. Her novels are like nobody else’s, from the transsexual coloratura of
The Passion of New Eve
to the music-hall knees-up of
Wise Children;
but the best of her, I think, is in her stories. Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky opium-eater’s cadences interrupted by harsh or comic discords, that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flimflam, can be wearying. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while she’s ahead.
Carter arrived almost fully formed; her early story “A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home” is already replete with Carterian motifs. Here is the love of the gothic, of lush language and high culture; but also of low stinks—falling rose-petals that sound like pigeon’s farts, and a father who smells of horse dung, and bowels that are “great levelers.” Here is the self as performance: perfumed, decadent, languorous, erotic, perverse; very like the winged woman, Fevvers, heroine of her penultimate novel,
Nights at the Circus.
Another early story, “A Victorian Fable,” announces her addiction to all the arcana of language. This extraordinary text, half “Jabberwocky,” half
Pale Fire,
exhumes the past as never before, by exhuming its dead words: “In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.”
Be advised, these early stories say: this writer is no meat-and-potatoes hack; she is a rocket, a Catherine wheel. She will call her first collection
Fireworks.
Several of the
Fireworks
stories deal with Japan, a country whose tea-ceremony formality and dark eroticism bruised and challenged Carter’s imagination. In “A Souvenir of Japan” she arranges polished images of that country before us. “The story of Momotaro, who was born from a peach.” “Mirrors make a room uncosy.” Her narrator presents her Japanese lover to us as a sex object, complete with bee-stung lips. “I should like to have had him embalmed . . . so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.” The lover is, at least, beautiful; the narrator’s view of her big-boned self, as seen in a mirror, is distinctly uncozy. “In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: ‘For Young and Cute Girls Only.’ When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch.”
In “Flesh and the Mirror” the exquisite, erotic atmosphere thickens, approaching pastiche—for Japanese literature has specialized rather in these heated sexual perversities—except when it is cut through sharply by Carter’s constant self-awareness. (“Hadn’t I gone eight thousand miles to find a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it to satisfy me?” her narrator asks; as,
She was too individual, too fierce a writer to dissolve easily, however: by turns formal and outrageous, exotic and demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black. Her novels are like nobody else’s, from the transsexual coloratura of
The Passion of New Eve
to the music-hall knees-up of
Wise Children;
but the best of her, I think, is in her stories. Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky opium-eater’s cadences interrupted by harsh or comic discords, that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flimflam, can be wearying. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while she’s ahead.
Carter arrived almost fully formed; her early story “A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home” is already replete with Carterian motifs. Here is the love of the gothic, of lush language and high culture; but also of low stinks—falling rose-petals that sound like pigeon’s farts, and a father who smells of horse dung, and bowels that are “great levelers.” Here is the self as performance: perfumed, decadent, languorous, erotic, perverse; very like the winged woman, Fevvers, heroine of her penultimate novel,
Nights at the Circus.
Another early story, “A Victorian Fable,” announces her addiction to all the arcana of language. This extraordinary text, half “Jabberwocky,” half
Pale Fire,
exhumes the past as never before, by exhuming its dead words: “In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.”
Be advised, these early stories say: this writer is no meat-and-potatoes hack; she is a rocket, a Catherine wheel. She will call her first collection
Fireworks.
Several of the
Fireworks
stories deal with Japan, a country whose tea-ceremony formality and dark eroticism bruised and challenged Carter’s imagination. In “A Souvenir of Japan” she arranges polished images of that country before us. “The story of Momotaro, who was born from a peach.” “Mirrors make a room uncosy.” Her narrator presents her Japanese lover to us as a sex object, complete with bee-stung lips. “I should like to have had him embalmed . . . so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.” The lover is, at least, beautiful; the narrator’s view of her big-boned self, as seen in a mirror, is distinctly uncozy. “In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: ‘For Young and Cute Girls Only.’ When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch.”
In “Flesh and the Mirror” the exquisite, erotic atmosphere thickens, approaching pastiche—for Japanese literature has specialized rather in these heated sexual perversities—except when it is cut through sharply by Carter’s constant self-awareness. (“Hadn’t I gone eight thousand miles to find a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it to satisfy me?” her narrator asks; as,
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