Wise Children Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Angela Carter

  Praise

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Dramatis Personae

  Notes

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and Chances, Angela Carter’s witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins and mistaken identities as any Shakespearean comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.

  About the Author

  Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and Wise Children (1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published: Fireworks (1974), The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award), Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). She was the author of The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), and two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992). She died in February 1992.

  ALSO BY ANGELA CARTER

  Short Stories

  Fireworks

  The Bloody Chamber

  Black Venus

  American Ghosts and Old World Wonders

  Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

  The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

  The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

  Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (editor)

  Novels

  Shadow Dance

  The Magic Toyshop

  Several Perceptions

  Heroes and Villains

  Love

  The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

  The Passion of New Eve

  Nights at the Circus

  Non-fiction

  The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in

  Cultural History

  Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings

  Expletives Deleted

  Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings

  Drama

  Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays

  The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works

  ‘Dora and Nora Chance are the illegitimate twin daughters of the great Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard. Disowned by his family and, by extension, the whole “legitimate” theatre to which he belongs, they set out on a career as chorus girls, working their way through the music halls and, after achieving a brief moment of celluloid immortality, ending their dancing days in a dispiriting succession of post-war revues with titles like Nudes, Ahoy! and Nudes of the World . . . Carter’s insistent aim is to show how thoroughly the legitimate and illegitimate worlds are entangled, and in a country whose cultural life continues to be crippled by false distinction between “high” and “low”, this is an important subject for any novel . . . Between these poles . . . lies endless scope for verbal exuberance, exotic figures of speech, filthy colloquialisms and more than a smattering of good jokes’

  Guardian

  ‘Wise Children is a celebration of wrong-sidedness. It is a south London novel, announcing itself defiantly as hailing from the wrong side of the tracks . . . The book’s narrator, Dora Chance, twin sister to Nora in a novel bursting with twins, hails from the wrong side of the blanket as well as the tracks. The two girls, the Lucky Chances as they are known on the halls, are the unacknowledged offspring of the famous Shakespearean actor, Sir Melchior Hazard, in whose person all the great hams of the age – Wolfit, Richardson, Olivier – are united and exceeded . . . In Wise Children Hamlet’s great soliloquy becomes a sketch for the Chance girls in bellhop costumes, wondering if a parcel should be delivered to “2b or not 2b”. Nobody’s parents are their real parents – Dora and Nora’s Grandma Chance may actually be their mother, and the closest thing they have to a grandfather is, not inappropriately, a clock – and children, too, are easily found and lost’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘The saga is a slack-jawed, razor-witted jounce through the highways and back alleys of twentieth-century showbiz, coupled with a family history of Byzantine complexity . . . We’re flipped effortlessly through the decades and immersed in a flailing menagerie of characters. Both the physical detail and geist of each era are brought alive with unerring dabs of description. The earthiness and orotundity of Carter’s prose is as dazzling as ever . . . Wise Children is a glorious, high-kicking carnival of ill-decorum, and a shrewd chronicle of personal survival’

  Observer

  ‘Angela Carter has always been an exuberant writer and never more so than in Wise Children, her first novel in seven years (and her eleventh work of fiction). This is a book that moves effortlessly from shock to coincidence, from slight complication to swift resolution, from suspense to thumpingly absurd resolution, and yet at every point the incidents feel more musical than literary, as though the author’s only goal had been to create the verbal equivalent of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte . . . The best thing in the book is Dora herself, an actress who has played in Shakespeare and vaudeville and even in one disastrous Hollywood film, a survivor who has taken in an old enemy out of compassion and foregone a dazzling marriage out of pity, a game old thing in the attic of a house in Brixton, pegging away at her word processor, an electronic palette on which she blends purple prose and the bluest of blue words, a good old girl who is as eternal as her real and putative fathers’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ANGELA CARTER

  Wise Children

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  Ali Smith

  Introduction

  What exactly is the wisdom advocated in Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children? First, there’s its blatant demand that we lighten up. ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ Then there’s a much less exclamatory kind of wisdom. Take the word ‘child’. Carter, a writer fond of what words mean, will have known that for much of its history it was specifically a provincial word for ‘girl’. ‘Mercy on’s, a barne; a very pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder?’ as the old shepherd says when he finds, by chance, on the shores of Bohemia, the abandoned baby Perdita in Shakespeare’s late romance of birth, death and rebirth, The Winter’s Tale.

  Wisdom and innocence. Innocence and knowing. Wise Children is a knowing text, packed with interlayered allusion and literary embedding – most of all wise to the fertility there is in any notion of ‘embedding’. Cheerfully bawdy, it’s Carter’s most glorious, most comic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance. By chance it was also her last novel. She died young, at only 51, the year after its publication, so it takes crowning place in her now recognisably revolutionary literary project.

  ‘Most intellectual development depends on new readings of old texts,’ she wrote in 1983. ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’1 She was a committed feminist and socialist, ‘the pure product of an advanced, industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline,’2 and someone who saw all art as helplessly political, because made by history and belonging to its time. Her feminism and socialism for
m a twinned impetus in her work. ‘Flesh comes to us out of history,’ she wrote in her ground-breaking study of women and gender-codification, The Sadeian Woman (1979), one of the books which caused even more than the usual critical alarm and outrage at its writer on its publication. After her first highly praised and steadily award-winning novels of the 1960s, her baroque, gaudy and often violent rejection of British realism in book after fearless book filled with nasty tyrant-puppeteers, falling and failing civilisations and clever lost heroines strung between violence or madness, had earned her a critical reputation as maddeningly uncategorisable. In the end critics liked to label her as tricksy magical-realist. This was a term she scorned in the same way that she scorned the notion that realism was the only available version of ‘real’. ‘I’ve got nothing against realism. But there is realism and realism. The questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality.’3

  Lorna Sage, Carter’s great friend and most assiduous critic, noted that 1979, the year in which she published not just The Sadeian Woman but also her most celebrated collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber – the first of her collections in which she explicitly changed the endings of traditional tales to let, for instance, Bluebeard’s bride beard Bluebeard or Red Riding Hood seduce the wolf – was the year her interest in transformation as a theme became most accessible to her readers. After this a new laughter, a greater verve, and a sharper keenness to banish puritan constraint, entered her work.

  The critics certainly felt a lot safer with her final two novels, tending to see the worlds of a feathered barmaid and high-kicking hoofers in Nights at the Circus and Wise Children as ‘more benign’4 on the whole than the earlier work where, typically and casually, in works like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), a male protagonist is every bit as likely to shift gender or be gang-raped by a troupe of male acrobats as the literary canon is to be questioned, satirised and rewritten.

  But from her first novel, Shadow Dance (1966), all the way to Wise Children (1991), Carter’s work goes out of its way to take to pieces the powerful machineries of romanticism, desire, dominant narrative and social codification, as well as the machineries of fiction itself, to lay them bare before a reader and show her or him how those machineries are working.

  From its sprightly opening riddle onwards, everything in Wise Children is about duality – and most immediately, Carter suggests, social duality. The aging birthday girl narrator is one half of a duo: Nora and Dora, ‘the legendary Chance sisters’. They’re from ‘the wrong side’ of a two-track city (and a two-track family and a two-track art form and a two-track tradition and a two-track culture and a two-track world). ‘Once upon a time you could make a crude distinction thus,’ Dora says, making a fairy tale of the real, of the complications of the coming of affluence to this always poorer, always hybrid South of the city. There’s nothing else to do but to bless their chance ownership of a small patch of it, number 49 Bard Road. ‘If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags . . . bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out immediately to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags.’

  Never has the joy of dancing and singing been made so darkly and lightly relative in the same instant as in the opening pages of this all-singing, all-dancing delight of a novel which, in five chapters, or five good farcical theatrical acts, travels from morning to evening of a single day and from one end of the twentieth century to the other, in a paean to, well, pretty much everything entertaining that ever happened, in a blend of literature, classical theatre, cheap vaudeville and Hollywood cinema.

  Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of the champion English alchemist of fused high-and-low art, Shakespeare, whose windy spring birthday the twin old girls – and their twin father and uncle before them, and various other (twin, of course) members of their family – share. So all life is here in this virtuoso performance, whose chapters end in transformations, whose separate sentences resound with internal rhyme and rhythm, whose eye and ear are on Englishness and tradition, whose spirit is out for ‘a bit of fun’, and whose themes are the Shakespearian dualities – twins and doubling, fathers and daughters, lost family and found family, comedy and tragedy. But Wise Children’s aesthetic landscape is determinedly beyond tragedy – as Dora says, with a quite violent insistence, ‘I refuse point blank to play in tragedy’ – and beyond comedy too. Instead the novel is deep-steeped in the later romance plays, like Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, where the yoked opposites of life and death are the crux of the story, but rebirth is the art.

  Carter’s Chance girls are illegitimate twice (of course) – first when it comes to their natural father, the noble Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard, king of the ‘Royal family’ of British theatre (and twin brother of the most benign of Carter’s Prospero figures, the magician Peregrine) – and second, in the twin unacceptability of their own ‘dramatic art’ – their hoofing it at the ‘fag end of vaudeville’ and their being girls on the halls, to boot. Although their real grandmother in her time played all the heroines in Shakespeare and even played Hamlet, they’ve ended up discarded illegitimate brats, named by chance (what’s a Hazard anyway, but a posh word for Chance, in another of Carter’s glorious, casual redefinings). They exist by the thread of chance, by the kindness, imagination and invention of Grandma Chance, only one of the remarkable old-lady-survivors in a book full of them. ‘Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand – a stray pair of orphaned babes, a ragamuffin in a flat cap. She created it by sheer force of personality . . . It is a characteristic of human beings, one I’ve often noticed, that if they don’t have a family of their own, they will invent one.’

  Each chapter celebrates the inventiveness of the imagination. In Nora’s and Dora’s journey from young pirates to old interlopers Carter entertains us with an extraordinary interlaying of art and popular culture that breaches both’s so-called boundaries – and suggests that you need ‘smashing legs’ to play Shakespeare. The interlayered (and sometimes actual cameo) ‘appearances’ from Austen, Milton, Coward, Dickens, Carroll, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald, Brecht and Shaw (to name only a few of the writers whose work is woven somewhere into the text) rub up against the fleeting starry presences of Fred Astaire, Ruby Keeler, W.C. Fields, Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin (resurrected and priapic, ‘hung like a horse’) – a litany of greater and lesser known stars in a book which thoroughly parodies Hollywood’s own 1930s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (only one of the many Shakespeare plays that Carter card-shuffles into her novel in the space of roughly 240 pages). ‘I was attempting to encompass something from every Shakespeare,’ she said in a radio interview with the writer Paul Bailey only months before she died. ‘I mean, I couldn’t actually at all . . . I mean, you know, Titus Andronicus was very difficult . . . But I got a lot in!’5

  Each chapter also celebrates a family affair. Each celebrates a birthday. Each celebrates vulgar, forceful life, typically turning a sentence like ‘there he was, on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare’ into its own funny, sexy innuendo. The key concept here is celebration, which, though never uncomplicated, is always merry, carnivalesque. ‘Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkeys. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living’ as Dora puts it; these wise children know very young that performance is about an openness to potential, a hope, which Dora calls anticipation. ‘I . . . have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.’

  In 1980, in a very fine essay about the writer Colette and her years of notoriety and survival on the French stage, Carter reveals herse
lf as fascinated by the life, ‘as picaresque as a woman’s may be without putting herself in a state of hazard.’ She sees Colette’s 1910 novel about stage-life, La Vagabonde, as ‘still one of the most truthful expositions of the dilemma of a free woman in a male-dominated society.’6 Elsewhere in Carter’s work, theatres burn angrily and liberatingly down. But in Wise Children and Nights at the Circus, she positively uses the space – she makes something else of it, with characters who use it and make a living by it in a world where it’s hard to make a living if you’re a girl and you’re poor. Take the horrific graffiti representation of a woman as a zero, passive, a ring-shaped ‘O’, a ‘sign for nothing’, ‘a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled,’ as Carter puts it in the first pages of The Sadeian Woman, a nothing from whose ‘elemental iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences.’7 If you compare this to what Carter does in her final two novels with the circus ring, the theatre – the space were we act – then a whole new performative metaphysic of potential becomes possible.

  Elsewhere in her work, girls and women are hugely troubled by their mirror images and what to make of them. Here, the mirror-image comes to mean more and differently than it has before. It means sisterhood, family, the kind of love that makes Dora want to survive – and it means strength. ‘Neither of us anything special on our own – skinny things with mouse-brown bobs – but, put us together, we turned heads.’ The duo is an inspired image for the power of the communal. ‘On our own, you wouldn’t look at us twice. But put us together . . .’ and something legendary happens.

  This doesn’t mean that Carter is any less sharp – in a world where Shakespeare’s head is on the money, as it were – in her delineation of the social position of girls and women. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ Money, class and gender are tightly bound together in her take on the girls’ Freudian descents of endless showbiz staircases (particularly in the case of Tiffany, with ‘her feet leaving blood behind them as she came down’); in her reading of Hollywood as ‘a very peculiar brothel, where all the girls for sale were shadows’; and perhaps most particularly in this novel’s ghost, the fleeting near-invisible presence of Kitty, the girls’ birth-mother, a thin rag of a girl who works emptying the slops in a poor theatrical lodging house, is made pregnant by chance or the usual design, and dies very young.