Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage

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Her hair went through all the colours of the rainbow before becoming white at the moment when decorum would have suggested a discreet, still-youthful streaked mouse. Once, when I was staying at her house, I discovered I had mislaid my make-up and she dug out a paintbox from Japan, some kind of actor’s or geisha’s kit, which was all slick purple, rusty carmine and green grease.

      She escaped the character expected of the woman writer by similar strategies. That is, she substituted work for inwardness. She’d once wanted, in adolescence, to be an actress; when I talked with her in 1977, she insisted that writing was public: ‘Sometimes when you say to people you’re a writer, they say, “Have you had anything published?” Which is a bit like saying to an actor, “Have you ever been on the stage?” Because if it’s not published it doesn’t exist.’ And the same point, made more succinctly: ‘I mean, it’s like the right true end of love.’

      Not that she stopped consulting the mirror. A small allegory: Plotinus and later Neoplatonists suggested mischievously that you could draw a subversive moral from the fate of Narcissus – it’s not self-obsession that destroys you, but the failure to love yourself coolly and intelligently and sceptically enough. If he’d recognized his own image in the water he could have made a real beginning on knowing himself. Angela looked into some dangerous mirrors—for instance, de Sade’s (in The Sadeian Woman, 1979), but by then she’d stepped through the Japanese looking-glass and could say, ‘Flesh comes to us out of history.’ When she came back to England she had her career to build all over again, and that’s what she did, with help from journalism and an Arts Council Fellowship in Sheffield. She was hard up and marginalized in ways she didn’t at all relish. She had no secure relationship with a publisher – between 1971 and 1977 she moved from Hart-Davis to Quartet to Gollancz – she couldn’t make enough money out of her fiction to live on and she didn’t fit easily into the classic outsider role. She never accepted the madwoman-in-the-attic school of thought about the woman writer, particularly not about the Gothic or fantastical writer: freaks and fairies, she believed, were as much socially determined as anyone else; our ‘symbols’ are of course ours. Theory apart, however, she had a thin time during the 1970s, and she was painfully prickly about her reputation. When she filled in an author’s publicity form for Gollancz (who published The Passion of New Eve in 1977 in their ‘science fiction and fantasy’ category), there was a section asking her to list her previous publications. Angela wrote simply ‘7 novels’, without giving even the titles.

      Some time before this, she wrote to me from Albert Road, Sheffield, about Virago, and her great friend and fan Carmen Callil’s plans to republish women. She was thinking hard about ‘the woman writer’, and meeting a pissed Elizabeth Smart at a party at Emma Tennant’s had given her bitter food for thought:

      ‘It is hard for women,’ she slurred. Actually it was a very peculiar experience because she clearly wanted to talk in polished gnomic epigrams about anguish and death and boredom and I honestly couldn’t think of anything to say. Except, I understand why men hate women and they are right, yes, right. Because we should set good examples to the poor things. (Was surprised to find Mary Wollstonecraft making exactly the same point, in a way.) … It was all very odd. I don’t mean to sound hard. I mean, I’m sure her life has been astoundingly tragic. And I began to plot a study of the Jean Rhys/E. Smart/E. O’Brien woman titled ‘Self-inflicted wounds’, which kind of brings me to the point, or anyway, a point.

      I’m on the editorial committee of this publishing firm, VIRAGO …

      From her point of view, Virago was meant – among many, many other things – to make money out of and for women’s writing and to rescue it from the slough of passive suffering:

      The whole idea is very tentative at the moment, obviously. I suppose I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. (BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.)

      She herself was working on the Sade book at the time, and her ideas for Virago included some books by men (Sade’s Justine, Richardson’s Clarissa) which got at the roots of female ‘pathology’. She feared and loathed and found hilarious the spectacle of the suffering woman. The Sade book was an exorcism of sorts, too. She needed to theorize in order to feel in charge and to cheer herself up, and that has left its mark marvellously on the fiction too, which is full of ideas, armed with them. (Desiderio in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972, avoids being eaten by a tribe of river Indians, who are hoping magically to absorb his literacy, because he’s a good enough anthropologist to rumble their plans. Like Angela, he’s read his Lévi-Strauss. Much more recently, in Nights at the Circus, Fevvers escapes a murderous Rosicrucian by the same ploy, having this time read Frances Yates, I’d imagine.)

      Anyway, with the Sade book and The Bloody Chamber in 1979, she rounded off the decade triumphantly. The fairy tale idea was a real breakthrough and enabled her to read with a new appropriateness and panache, as though she was telling these stories. She took to teaching creative writing too. In 1980 she went to the United States, to Brown University, where she substituted for John Hawkes: no one had read her, she said, but she enjoyed it enormously and had the company of her friends Robert and Pili Coover. Bit by bit, her earlier work would be republished (in Picador and King Penguin, as well as Virago); she would acquire a solid relation with Chatto & Windus, when Carmen Callil moved there; she would become a delighting globe-trotter, a visiting writer/teacher/performer; and her work would be translated into all the major European languages. In 1984 she was still broke enough to be tempted to come and teach on the creative writing programme at my university, East Anglia. I acted – apprehensively – as the go-between on this deal, well aware that she didn’t see eye to eye with Malcolm Bradbury, who ran the course. Since he wasn’t there when she was, this arrangement survived precariously until 1987, with the two of them alternating like the man and woman who forecast the weather. She chucked it in with relief, though students as different as Kazuo Ishiguro and Glenn Patterson had been rewards in themselves. I suppose the point to make about these years is this: she had to struggle hard to sustain her confidence, in the face of frequent indifference, condescension and type-casting. She was not, either, able to repose securely in the bosom of the sisterhood, since her insistence on reclaiming the territory of the pornographers – just for example – set her against feminist puritans and separatists. And of course she was in general an offence to the modest, inward, realist version of the woman writer. John Bayley, lately, in the New York Review of Books, contrived to imply that she had an almost cosy ‘place’ from the start: a magical realist, a post-modernist. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Her work was unclassifiable in terms of British fiction, except as ‘Gothic’ or ‘fantasy’, throughout the whole difficult middle period of her career. If that situation has changed, it is largely because she refused to write ‘fantasy’ as (merely) alternative, ‘in opposition’, and because she made large demands on her readers.

      Bad-tempered footnotes department:

      Exhibit One: a letter undated, ‘Tuesday’:

      Very bland place. At least, Toronto is … The son and his father didn’t miss me. But they seem glad to see me back. It seems we might well be going to Texas next spring; am awaiting letter. Am planning to write novel about sensitive, fine-grained art historian whose

      PTO

      life is totally changed by winning large, vulgar cash prize, she dies [sic] her hair green and wears leather trousers etc. Sniffs glue and turns into Kathy Acker …

      Exhibit Two: a postcard from the States:

      Have just heard about the Booker. I hope he drinks himself to death on the prize money (you know me, ever fair and compassionate). Will telephone soon – I keep meaning to write you the kind of letter people write in biographies, but there ain’t time.

      Ending

      Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place … I could have been

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