Angela Carter - Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

The last time I visited Angela Carter, a few weeks before she died, she had insisted on dressing for tea, in spite of being in considerable pain. She sat bright-eyed and erect, head cocked like a parrots, lips satirically pursed, and got down to the serious teatime business of giving and receiving the latest dirt: sharp, foulmouthed, passionate.

That is what she was like: spikily outspoken once, after Id come to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, Well. Youre going to be seeing a lot more of me from now on and at the same time courteous enough to overcome mortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea.

Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one consolation. She had taken out an immense life insurance policy shortly before the cancer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortune to her boys (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating black-comedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh.

She planned her funeral carefully. My instructions were to read Marvells poem On a Drop of Dew. This was a surprise. The Angela Carter I knew had always been the most scatologically irreligious, merrily godless of women; yet she wanted Marvells 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 Marvells high symbolic language from a writer whose own favoured language was also pitched high, and replete with symbols? It should be noted that no divinity makes an appearance in Marvells 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 elses, 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-eaters cadences interrupted by harsh or comic discords, that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flim-flam, can be exhausting. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while shes 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 pigeons farts, and a father who smells of horse dung, and bowels that are great levellers. 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.