Angela Carter - Nothing sacred : selected writings

VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS
674

Angela Carter

Angela Carter (19401992) was born in Eastbourne and brought up in south Yorkshire. One of Britains most original and disturbing writers, she read English at Bristol University and wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1965. The Magic Toyshop won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1969 and Several Perceptions won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1968. More novels followed and in 1974 her translation of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault was published, and in the early nineties she edited the Virago Book of Fairy Tales (2 vols). Her journalism appeared in almost every major publication; a collection of the best of these were published by Virago in Nothing Sacred (1982). She also wrote poetry and a film script together with Neil Jordan of her story The Company of Wolves. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published to widespread acclaim in 1991. Angela Carters death at age fifty-one in February 1992 robbed the English literary scene of one of its most vivacious and compelling voices Independent.

By Angela Carter

Fiction

Shadow Dance

The Magic Toyshop

Several Perceptions

Heroes and Villains

Love

The Infernal Desire of Doctor Hoffman

The Passion of New Eve

Nights at the Circus

Wise Children

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Black Venus

American Ghosts & Old World Wonders

Burning Your Boats: the Complete Short Stories

Fireworks

Angela Carters Book of Wayward Girls and

Wicked Women

Non-Fiction

The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings

The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

Angela Carters Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings

NOTHING
SACRED

Selected Writings

Angela Carter

VIRAGO

First published by Virago Press Limited 1982

This edition published by Virago Press 2016

Copyright Angela Carter 1967, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1989, 1990

This selection and all introductory matter

Copyright Angela Carter 1982 and 1992

The 1992 revised edition included five new pieces:

The Recession Style, Frida Kahlo, Louise Brooks,

Love in a Cold Climate and Alisons Giggle

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-34900-810-3

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All the following pieces were originally published in New Society, with the exception of these: The Mother Lode, which first appeared in the New Review; The Belle as Businesswoman, which first appeared in the Observer; the review of Anthony Alpers biography of Katherine Mansfield, which first appeared in the Guardian; and the study of Colette, and the book review of Louise Brooks which originally appeared in the London Review of Books; Alisons Giggle was first published in The Left and The Erotic, Lawrence and Wishart, 1983; Frida Kahlo was first published by Redstone Press, 1989; Love in a Cold Climate was given as a paper at a conference on the Language of Passion, University of Pisa, 1990.

I would like to thank both Paul Barker, and also Tony Gould, of New Society, who, over a period of fifteen years or so, never batted an eyelid and always corrected my spelling. Thank you.

The photograph on D.H. Lawrence as a baby.

The first house in which I remember living gives a false impression of our circumstances. This house was part of the archaeology of my mothers mothers life and gran dug it up again and dived back within it when the times became precarious, that is, in 1940, and she took me with her, for safetys sake, with this result: that I always feel secure in South Yorkshire.

This first house of my memory was a living fossil, a two-up, two-down, red-brick, slate-tiled, terraced miners cottage architecturally antique by the nineteenth-century standards of the rest of the village. There was a lavatory at the end of the garden beyond a scraggy clump of Michaelmas daisies that never looked well in themselves, always sere, never blooming, the perennial ghosts of themselves, as if ill-nourished by an exhausted soil. This garden was not attached to the cottage; the back door opened on to a paved yard, with a coal-hole beside the back gate that my grandmother topped up with a bit of judicious thieving for, unlike the other coal-holes along the terrace, ours was not entitled to the free hand-out from the pits for miners families. Nor did we need one. We were perfectly well-off. But gran couldnt resist knocking off a lump or two. She called this activity: snawking, either a dialect or a self-invented word, I dont know which.

There was an access lane between the gate of the yard and the gate of the garden, so it was a very long trip out to the lavatory, especially in winter. We used chamber-pots a good deal jerries cause of much hilarity due to the hostilities. My mother had a pastel-coloured, Victorian indelicacy which she loved to repeat: When did the queen reign over China? This whimsical and harmless scatalogical pun was my first introduction to the wonderful world of verbal transformations, and also a first perception that a joke need not be funny to give pleasure.

Beyond the brick-built lavatory, to which we used to light our way after dark with a candle lantern, was a red-brick, time-stained, soot-dulled wall that bounded an unkempt field; this field was divided by a lugubrious canal, in which old mattresses and pieces of bicycle used to float. The canal was fringed with willows, cruelly lopped, and their branches were always hung with rags tied in knots. I dont know why. It was a witchy, unpremeditated sight. Among the tips where we kids used to play were strange pools of oleaginous, clay-streaked water. A neighbours child drowned in one of them.

The elements of desolation in the landscape give no clue to the Mediterranean extraversion and loquacity of the inhabitants. Similarly, all this grass-roots, working-class stuff, the miners cottage and the bog at the end of the garden and all, is true, but not strictly accurate. The processes of social mobility had got under way long before I had ever been thought of, although my mother always assured me I had never been thought of as such, had simply arrived and, as I will make plain, somewhat inconveniently, too.