Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings of Angela Carter Chatto & Windus 641pp, £25 in UK
To adapt the title of one of her novels, Angela Carter's fiction is its own surreal, gothic magic toyshop. Her collaboration with Neil Jordan on the screenplay of The Company of Wolves illustrates her dark, folkloric imagination in a series of unforgettable images - such as the wolf's head turning back to its human contours in a barrel of milk. But just as the film is strictly art house viewing, Carter's fiction is not, dare I say it, easy reading. Spiky, challenging, anarchic, elliptical, phantasmagoric, yes. But not the kind of books I would choose to snuggle down with of an evening for a cosy read.
Reading Shaking a Leg, on the other hand, is like sitting down with a friend who is clever, funny, outrageous, compassionate, anecdotal and sociologically aware; someone with a great memory and a quirky, associative train of thought; someone who can make you laugh and say "yes" out loud before you turn the page to devour her next paragraph, whether it be about Hollywood or Venice, her dotty parents or her favourite writers. Carter is endlessly entertaining, endearing and down-to-earth in this admirably comprehensive collection. It is still hard to accept that she died five years ago from lung cancer at the tragically young age of 51.
She is refreshingly clear about being a feminist writer: her "questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman" in the heady summer of 1968 led to her central concern with "the social fictions that regulate our lives". One such fiction nearly led to her own death from anorexia: "I assumed that no man in his right mind could ever have been attracted to Fat Angie; therefore I reduced myself to a physical condition - that of Walking Corpse - that only a chronic necrophile could have fancied."
She does a brilliant de construction job on porn queen Linda Lovelace (she of Deep Throat fame): "If my sexuality had been as systematically exploited by men as Ms Lovelace's has been, no doubt I, too, would want to swallow men's cocks whole; it is a happy irony she should have found fame and fortune by doing so."
In a lively discussion of the phenomenon of the French writer, Colette, Carter points out the limited options for a woman who lives a picaresque life in comparison with the male equivalent: "The social limitations to experience in a woman's life still preclude the kind of un-self-conscious picaresque adventuring that formed the artistic apprenticeship of Melville, Lowry, Conrad, while other socio-economic factors mean that those women who see most of the beastly backside of the world, that is, prostitutes, are least in a position to utilise this invaluable experience as art."
She writes beautifully about her family life, from her redoubtable maternal grandmother's south Yorkshire home in a mining village to her Scots journalist father's peculiarly "un-English ability to live life in, as it were, the third person". She had a bohemian childhood, full of charm, treats and her parents' castles in the air. Here she is describing delightfully her own first experience of breast feeding her baby son: "He fastens on the nipple with the furtive avidity of a secret tippler hitting the British sherry, glancing backwards to make sure nobody else gets there first."
There are gems everywhere, from her matchless evaluation of the work of writers Grace Paley and F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, to her insights into human nature as it exposes itself in relation to animals: "People treat the animals they have in their power according to their expectations of their treatment by people who have power over them."
She roves from Joyce, who "never succumbed to the delusion that people who do not say complicated things do not have complicated thoughts", to Japan - here is just one evocative slice of a Tokyo neighbourhood: "The sounds are: the brisk swish of broom on tatami matting, the raucous cawing of hooded crows in a nearby willow grove; clickety-clackety of chattering housewives, a sound like briskly plied knitting needles, for Japanese is a language full of Ts and Ks; and, in the mornings, the crowing of the cock."
Another bonus for Carter fans to note is that her 1969 novel, Love (complete with an ironic 1987 Afterword, updating us on the fate of her bizarre cast of characters with the benefit of her older, now feminist eyes) has just been published, as has The Curious Room, her Collected Dramatic Works (both by Vintage).
In spite of all this belated attention, one can't help remembering with a pang Carter's blunt, unpretentious dismissal of the value of posthumous fame to any writer, and her exposure of "the lies in the lumber room about the artist": ". . . about how terrific it is to be an artist, how you've got to suffer and how artists are wise and good people and a lot of crap like that". She has a lovely unvarnished view of the work of the writer, while remaining alive to the potential of the writer's raw material: "Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation."
Katie Donovan is a poet and journalist