I've just finished reading my Christmas present from @lickedspoon : the new biography of Angela Carter by Edmund
Gordon. It was a thoughtful present. She knows I am very interested in the
esoteric elements of the writing process as well as the unique cultural and
political processes of the twentieth century,
So, I passed several
days avoiding the inevitable post-Christmas torpor in reading this biography of
a writer who perhaps saw herself - and was seen - as the Che Guevara of English Post WW2
letters.
I don't envy
this biographer his huge task of apprising the millions of words, in terms
of work, journalism, commentary, and letters in her archive, including a thousand pages
in letters to a single friend - all now deposited in the British Library, if you want to
dip into it - that flowed from her pen in the complex task of
self-creation - of defining and redefining herself, inventing herself,
endowing reason to her impulses, adapting her interpretation of her
thoughts and experiences to 'prove' the truth of the centrality of
myth in her world-view.
Even as a feminist from
the beginning I have never thought of Angela Carter's work as more
than marginal and of esoteric interest (although she did anticipate with
prescience the present-day tranche of simplistic erotic vampire teenage
sub-literature.)
But the more I read
Gordon’s book the more interested I became in the way the unique psycho-drama
of her own life and the weird psychopathology exploded into her
writing. Having just finished a novel myself, focused on the inner life of an imaginative girl child I was a particularly captivated.
I began to see how 'the clever-undergraduate' characterises Angela's writing. Because (although
she had a truly big brain tuned into fantasy and turned that to good effect) she
didn't get to Oxford
Jane ‘tis so!
John ‘tis not!
Jane ‘tis so!
John ‘tis not!
Jane ‘tis so!
Jane bashes John over the head,
As the details
emerged in this biography it seemed to me that Angela was like a magpie picking
up bright things (and people) with which to line her writer's nest. The result of
this unique evolution has been - despite the hagiographic splurge of comment
that emerged after her very sadly early death at 51, the range of her literary
output can still be seen is somewhat chaotic, derivative and distinctively
un-synthesised.
These are the
characteristics of an autodidact, of course. Being a bit of an autodidact
myself I am aware that we grasp on every new bit of knowledge or insight like a
sweetie and parade it around like a banner. Angela Carter did this with her
mixture of Freud, Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, de Balzac, Baudelaire, Burgess, de
Sade, Grimm, Perrault and many others (A formidable task for this biographer to explore ...) Sweeties from all these sources were selected
to fit her particular imagined world-viewn regarding what it was to be human or
animal, what it was to be a man and what it was to be a woman. And she
communicated her special view that the differences between all these - (animal, human, man, woman) were essentially a social construct rather that a given identity - through her literary and journalistic output.
I began to think that
there is something of the infant in Angela’s phenomenal self-absorption.
I was also very impressed by
her literary self-confidence. She always felt she was a great writer and fated
to be famous, and convinced the people around her of this, through her
forceful self belief, her overt un-synthesised scholarship, alongside her mannered
whimsical charismatic charm. These qualities in total made her free
spirit attractive to a wide range of people who were much less sure of
themselves in those changing times. These included Carmen Calill and Liz
Calder, themselves gifted literary change makers; they included her baffled
depressed first husband and her silent, enamoured young second husband. They
included her two Japanese houseboy/lovers – one who thrived in later life, on
who didn’t. They included some of the students she mentored at the Universities
of Sheffield and East Anglia
I began to think
that her greatest creative product was herself; self-made, self-storying, self-constructed.
Her complex construction included the paradoxes confident/awkward, boastful/overtly modesty.
I ended up
wondering whether Angela had ever recovered from being the intensely
spoilt, greedy child of indulgent parents especially including an obsessively
possessive mother. The latent cruelty which blossomed in Carter's emotional
make- up and in her encyclopaedic writing was brought
to flower in part through her lifelong demonising of her mother, in her
struggle to declare her own separate soul. The stifling, intense feminisation of her childhood experience, it seems to me, set in motion her
further dogmatic (ie intellectually unsynthesised) assertions that
the differences between men and women are a social construct. And that there
need be no rules, no boundaries to her writing.
Still, when she
feels strongly about something one can trace an inverted snobbery in her
commentary. She flags up her distant working class background when it suits her, to
despise the pretentious middle class around her, of which she is a member. And then her reflections on the working class people around her focus more on the ridiculous and comedic than the human,
It seems she is such
a dedicated individualist she lacks empathy with both the middle class and the
working class contexts in which she finds herself. This might have afforded her
much greater insight as a writer into the true nature of myth and fairy tale in
society. This might have happened had she not hi-jacked them to fit her own psycho-social
worldview and make her personal art form.
The inchoate tumble
of these ideas - much vaunted as 'groundbreaking' and 'original', by her reader
and writer-fans - lacks the discipline which would have allowed her to work out
a credible coherent argument and contribute widely to thinking and
storying in this field. Her self-described role as the 'moral
pornographer' is disingenuous. It has a lot of esoteric charm but it
lacking in rigorous thought.
Reading Gordon’s
engrossing account of the talented Angela Carter’s invention of her own life did not at all put me off recognising her as a good writer in her time. But I
kept thinking of the bright universal wisdom of Ursula le Guin which
for me places her way above Angela Carter in terms of the skill, the fantastic
insight which endows true literary value of her work in the similar field.
The Invention of Angela CarterA Biography
By Edmund GordonChatto & Windus 2016
NB* This is my own
commentary* - a writer’s reaction this book.
For a more straightforward
review read
Rosemary Hill’s review in the Guardian
Rosemary Hill’s review in the Guardian
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