Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings

457 Pages·1998·4.01 MB·English

by  Angela Carter

Shaking a Leg

COLLECTED WRITINGS

ANGELA CARTER

With an Introduction by Joan Smith

Edited by Jenny Uglow

Research Assistant Charlotte Crofts
Back Cover:

"An electrifying intellectual autobiography, with all the narrative expanse, drama, outrage, and
high comedy of the author's fiction. Angela Carter is revealed here, anew, as one or the most
important thinkers of twentieth-century world literature -- and one of its most pungent voices." --
Rick Moody

One of contemporary literature's most original and affecting fiction writers, Angela
Carter also wrote brilliant nonfiction. Shaking a Leg comprises the best of her essays and
criticism, much of it collected for the first time. Carter's acute observations are spiked with her
piercing matter-of-factness, her devastating wit, her penchant for mockery, and her passion for
the absurd. Whether discussing films or food, feminism or fantasy, science fiction or sex, Carter
consistently explores new territories and overturns old ideas. No cultural icon escapes her
scrutiny; as in her fiction, Carter offers glorious evidence of the transforming power of the
imagination. From delightfully wicked commentaries on Gone With the Wind, a Japanese fertility
festival, and fellow writers, including Lawrence, Lovecraft, Borges, and Burroughs, to
enchanting personal essays, Carter shares her thoughts and herself with glee.

"What a wonderful collection -- sharp, funny, too decent for sarcasm but great wit and humanity,
an unusual combination. But it makes us miss her, miss laughing with her, that real, intelligent,
tough writing woman." -- Grace Paley

"Angela Carter is a dazzling, unflinching, mordant observer of contemporary appetites, an ironist
and a tragedian of twentieth-century cultural effects, a dazzling conjuror with language and with
symbols, a writer whose originality of eye and mind never fails to divert, to illuminate, to change
her readers' understanding and quicken our wits." -- Marina Warner
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
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Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Limited 1997
Published in Penguin Books 1998

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © the Estate of Angela Carter, 1997
Introduction copyright © Joan Smith, 1997
All rights reserved

Introduction to Wayward Girls & Wicked Women edited by Angela Carter.
Copyright © Angela Carter, 1986. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

Information about the original publication of the selections contained
herein appears in the chronology starting on page 609.

ISBN 0 14 02.7695 5
(CIP data available)

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Bembo

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
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.
Contents

Editor's note
Introduction by Joan Smith

SELF
The Mother Lode
My Father's House
Sugar Daddy
Notes from a Maternity Ward
Fools Are My Theme
Notes from the Front Line
Anger in a Black Landscape

BODY LANGUAGES
Fleshly Matters
Lovely Linda
Fat Is Ugly
A Well-Hung Hang-Up
Health on the Brain
Georges Bataille: Story of the Eye
Edward Shorter: A History of Women's Bodies
Eric Rhode: On Birth and Madness
Food Fetishes
The New Vegetarians
Saucerer's Apprentice
Jessica Kuper (ed.): The Anthropologist's Cookbook
Barbara Tims (ed.): Food in Vogue
Elizabeth David: English Bread and Yeast Cookery
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine and Other Dishes
Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed
Dressing Up and Down
Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style
The Wound in the Face
Trouser Protest
Year of the Punk
The Bridled Sweeties
Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter: Fashion and Anti-Fashion
David Kunzle: Fashion and Fetishisms
The Recession Style
Lou Taylor: Mourning Dress
Elizabeth Wilson: Adorned in Dreams
Roland Barthes: The Fashion System
Arthur Marwick: Beauty in History

HOME AND AWAY
What the Hell -- It's Home!
Bradford: Industry as Artwork
Fin de Siècle
The Oss Has His Day
Bath, Heritage City
What the Hell -- It's Home!
The Donnie Ferrets
The Paris of the North
D'You Mean South?
Poets in a Landscape
So There'll Always Be an England
Masochism for the Masses
Michael Moorcock: Mother London
Iain Sinclair: Downriver
Travelling
My Maugham Award
The Back of Beyond
Triple Flavour
Wet Dream City
A Petrified Harvest
Bread on Still Waters
Munch and Antibiotics
Constructing an Australia
Japan
Tokyo Pastoral
People as Pictures
Mishima's Toy Sword
Once More into the Mangle
Poor Butterfly
Death in Japan
A Fertility Festival
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
Ian Buruma: A Japanese Mirror
Junichiro Tanizaki: Naomi
Amerika
Tom Wolfe
That Arizona Home
Snow-Belt America
The Rise of the Preppies
Anne Campbell: The Girls in the Gang
Edmund White: The Beautiful Room Is Empty

LOOKING
Animalia
At the Zoo
Animals in the Nursery
In the Bear Garden
Little Lamb, Get Lost
All Creatures Great and Small
Song and Show
Now Is the Time for Singing
Bob Dylan on Tour
A Busker (Retired)
The Good Old Songs
Giants' Playtime
Wagner and the Mistral
Fun Fairs
Carlos Moore: Fela Fela
Phyllis Rose: Jazz Cleopatra
Screen and Dream
Femmes Fatales
Japanese Erotica
Much, Much Stranger than Fiction
Bertolucci: La Luna
Hal Ashby: Being There
The Draughtsman's Contract
The Belle as Businessperson
Jean-Luc Godard
Robert Coover: A Night at the Movies
Hollywood
Barry Paris Louise Brooks
In Pantoland
The Granada, Tooting
The Box
Theatre of the Absurd
Acting It Up on the Small Screen
The Box Does Furnish a Room
Monkey Business
The Wonderful World of Cops
Making Art
Berthold Hinz: Art in the Third Reich
Treasures of Ancient Nigeria
Artists of the Tudor Court
Pontus Hulten: The Arcimboldo Effect
Three Women Artists
Frida Kahlo

STORIES AND TELLERS
Tell Me A Story
Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction to English Literature
The Hidden Child
The Art of Horrorzines
The Better to Eat You With
An I for Truth
Latin Rhythms
Yashar Kemal: The Lords of Akchasaz
William Burroughs: Ah Pook Is Here
William Burroughs: The Western Lands
The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm
The Sweet Sell of Romance
Robert Darnton: The Great Cat Massacre
Irish Folk Tales, Arab Folktales
Bruce Chatwin: The Songlines
Through a Text Backwards: The Resurrection of the House of Usher
Milorad Pavic: Dictionary of the Khazars
Milorad Pavic: Landscape Painted with Tea
Writers and Readers
Lorenzo the Closet Queen
The Life of Katherine Mansfield
The Alchemy of the Word
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Grace Paley: The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Colette
Carol Ascher: Simone de Beauvoir
D. H. Lawrence, Scholarship Boy
Envoi: Bloomsday
Alison's Giggle
Trials of a Booker Judge
J. G. Ballard Empire of the Sun
The End: Reading South Africa
Christina Stead
Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter
Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
Love in a Cold Climate
Colin Greenland: Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle

Appendix: Introduction to Expletives Deleted
Chronology of Journalism and Occasional Writings (1964-91)
Editor's Note

This volume contains a substantial selection of Angela Carter's journalism from the
1960s until her death. It cannot be comprehensive, but I hope that the chronology at the end of
the book, which lists introductions as well as articles and reviews, will guide readers further.
In arranging the contents, I have followed Angela's own lead in the earlier collections,
Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992), using categories to define and separate but
also to tease and provoke. Inevitably, because her approach was so open and because she loved
strange conjunctions and overlapping currents, many pieces could move happily between
categories -- she put reviews into sections on countries, for example, insisting that books were a
guide to perception and should not always be fenced into literary divisions. I have adopted her
line and have also followed her in dividing the final section into "Stories and Tellers" and
"Writers and Readers", since her interest in genre, storytelling, magic and the way people make
"tales" out of ordinary lives, led her to see certain works in a different light to others. Within
each section the pieces run in date order except where two reviews relate to the same author,
when they appear together.
The chronology has been compiled after wide-ranging research, first by Mark Bell and
then by Charlotte Crofts, but it is still provisional and we hope that this volume will provide yet
more leads. Several people have helped in the quest and have dug deep into their own files. We
are particularly grateful to Paul Barker, former editor of New Society, who was an enormous help
in the early stages of collecting material, and to William Scammell, the editor of Nonesuch
Magazine at Bristol University, where Angela Carter's work first appeared. We would also like
to thank Carmen Callil, Susannah Clapp, John Ellis, Kim Evans, Malcolm Edwards, Michael
Moorcock, Deborah Rogers, David Pringle and Brian Stableford. And we all owe a debt to the
various publications from which these marvellous pieces come and to the many editors and
literary editors who -- as Angela herself said -- often accepted the most surprising things,
"without batting an eyelid".
Jenny Uglow, January 1997
Introduction

The first time I read a book by Angela Carter, it had such an impact on me that I rushed
off to the local library in search of more. Knowing little about this author I had discovered -- it
was the late 1970s and novels like Nights at the Circus and Wise Children were a long way in the
future -- I devoured everything I could find, delighted to find that one woman had produced
work as diverse as The Bloody Chamber, her sly re-casting of traditional fairy-tales, and a
thrilling polemic like The Sadeian Woman. I had just returned to live in London after a long
absence and Carter's hugely original engagement with the Marquis de Sade sustained me through
a rather lonely Christmas in a borrowed flat near Kew Gardens; I remember wandering through
the steamy palm house, mulling over her argument about the pornographic imagination beneath
dripping green fronds, then the shock of stepping outside into the sharp winter cold. I wouldn't
say reality intervened at that point, more that I'd been so caught up in a mental dialogue with this
woman I'd never met that I'd forgotten what time of year it was. Carter's ideas were like that,
staying in your head long after you'd put down the printed page, even when you weren't
absolutely sure you agreed with her -- a quality I don't want to describe as feminine, precisely,
but which certainly struck me then (and again now, reading this collection of her journalism and
shorter writings) as aeons away from the bombastic, know-it-all style of so much male discourse.
One of the many things I like about Shaking A Leg, in fact, is the way in which the articles and
reviews show Angela Carter's mind working, coming at a subject from different angles, changing
its focus, trying out a thought and seeing where it goes. The result isn't tentative, far from it --
few authors have been so passionately engaged -- but it's a kind of writing which invites the
reader to think, to argue back, to accost its creator with sentences beginning: "yes, but what
about. . .?"
From the very first pages of this book, which opens with Angela Carter's reflections on
her family history, there is a sense of someone returning again and again to the same subject,
seeing it from a different point of view. She has opinions but they are not set in stone; sometimes
she pokes fun at her younger, more solemn self. You get the feeling that, by writing it down, she
is trying to understand her background, a process which involves demolishing a few family
fictions -- and, perhaps, one or two of her own. Some of her relatives, her father and her maternal
grandmother for instance, emerge vividly and immediately from her prose. Her mother, a
shadowy figure compared to these domestic colossi, is revealed more slowly as a figure in her
own right -- and this gradual unveiling suggests, more powerfully than if it had been addressed
directly, the uneasy relationship between the women of Angela Carter's generation and the one
immediately before it. For she is in many senses a child of the 1960s, a decade which it has
recently been fashionable to denigrate, and she lived through those extraordinary upheavals
which amounted to a revolution in style, taste, politics -- in everything from superficially trivial
issues like fashion, about which she writes brilliantly and very funnily, to weighty matters like
class. That decade changed people's lives, mostly for the better in my view, but it also created a
generation gap more profound, I suspect, than anything that had gone before. This was especially
true for women and when Carter writes about her mother, she does not hesitate to acknowledge
limited aspirations and missed opportunities. There is also a muted note of self-interrogation, as
though she is forever asking herself, as have many of us whose lives were shaped by the great
wave of feminism which came out of the 6os, "how do I come to be as I am?"
What she was, in Carter's case, is difficult to define. Novels, short stories, radio plays,
fairy-tales, polemic, journalism: the scope of her writing, in an era when authors tend to be