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 siderable pain. She sat bright-eyed a, 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 e to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, "Well. Yoing to be seeing a lot more of me from now on" -- and at the same time courteous enough to overortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea.
Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one solation. She had taken out an "immense" life insurance policy shortly before the cer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortuo "her boys" (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating blaedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh.
She planned her funeral carefully. My instrus 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 wome 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 obeisao the metaphysi Marvells high symboliguage from a writer whose own favoured language was also pitched high, ae with symbols? It should be hat no divinity makes an appearan 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 being a part, simply, of art.
She was too individual, too fierce a writer to dissolve easily, however: by turns formal and eous, exotid 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 o the music-hall knees-up of Wise Children; but the best of her, I think, is iories. Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky, opium-eaters ces interrupted by harsh or ic discords, that moonstone-and-rhione mix of opulend flim-flam, be exhausting. Iories, she 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, det, 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 addi to all the ara of language. This extraordinary text, half-Jabberwocky, half-Pale Fire, exhumes the past by exhuming its dead words:
In every s and ginnel, bone-grubbers,
rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons,
peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their
morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flim a