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!’
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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 herself 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.’
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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.’
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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.
But Nora’s own first sexual encounter, cold and drunken, down a dark alley, as Dora reports it, as it happens, is with a married man, yes, but also a pantomime goose. Some might want to call it cheap and squalid realism, she suggests, but panto is full of wish-fulfilment and life can be larger than itself, if we choose to let it.
Carter liked, herself, to be a bit unexpectedly larger-than-life. She notes, in one of her last introductions to her books, the liberation in being ‘notoriously foul-mouthed’, a ‘soft-spoken, middle-aged English gentlewoman who swears like a trooper when roused.’
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More than a decade earlier she’d written to Lorna Sage about a particular legacy of wisdom she’d like to leave any daughter she might have. Having met the drunken, self-lacerating novelist, Elizabeth Smart, at a literary party and having been prompted by this to remember her own dislike of what she saw as a self-indulgent, self-hurting streak in some writers who happened to be women, she wrote to Sage about why she’d decided to take a place on the board of the brand new venture in publishing that would become Virago books. ‘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.’
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The buoyancy in
Wise Children
is all to do with what you might call an equivalent largeness of voice – and with its darker twin, its mirror opposite, silence. ‘The rest is silence’ is a line straight out of tragedy. The trick of the live voice is to refuse, like Austen, to dwell on guilt and misery. The life and soul of
Wise Children
is Dora, whom Carter herself called ‘Englishness as a persona,’
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and Dora’s personality is her indefatigable first-person delivery – her voice. ‘It’s the American tragedy in a nutshell. They look around the world and think: “There must be something better!” But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now,’ as she says, in chapter three, whose theme is heaven and its impossibility, in a voice careful to soften and humanise its own blow with every cliché.
Cliché is always larger than life, and a kind of oral communal agreement in itself. Carter was particularly drawn to the politics of voice – how the oral tradition often outwits, and is often the live source, for the written. ‘It’s an accident of the twentieth century that I’m literate,’ she said, recalling her own family history, since literacy was had by chance, in the shape of an early Scottish education for members of her father’s family and, on her mother’s side, a much later education via ‘that Education Act in the 1880s . . . This elevation of the named writer has always seemed to me very very unfair on something like 95% of the human race, who didn’t have the ability to write, but which didn’t stop them, you know, inventing things . . . One of the things I’ve always deeply respected about Shakespeare – it was obvious he didn’t very much care whether he was published or not. I mean it seems to me that he really is in many respects something rather archaic in that he did actually write for the voice.’
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Dora Chance is the only completely female first-person protagonist in Carter’s novels – one who knows, like Carter, that ‘we carry our history on our tongues,’ and knows too that she’s very much an illegitimate chronicler, that the female voice has had much less chance to be recorded over time, history being what it is. A brilliant creation, Dora’s voice infers a double act, individual and communal at once, speaking for an experience communally had, a life communally lived. She loves cliché, which keeps so many dangerous stories survivable: ‘What hoops the kept woman has to jump to work her passage.’ And cliché can be sexy: ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay too.’
‘The unofficial chronicler’ is the more literary sister in a duo whose names summon connections with twentieth-century male giants of thought and literature, Freud and Joyce, and whose characters escape the fates of their inferred namesakes. This particular Dora is a writer able to take issue with her own literary ‘education’ at the hands of her American boyfriend, Irish (a thinly disguised F. Scott Fitzgerald): ‘a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.’ Finally, Dora’s role as narrator is a double-edged one, as Carter, who saw Dora’s voice as close to a stand-up performance, likes to remind us from time to time. Is she maybe nothing more than a batty, drunk old woman, ‘in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor’ who wants you to buy her a drink and to regale you with her life story? Because if she is – even if she’s the female twentieth-century version of the Ancient Mariner – then she’ll also, the very next moment, be the author of a knowing literary jolt of a paragraph like this:
But truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.
In that essay on Colette, Carter wrote about the moment in Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs when she records the surreality of her being in the same room as (if not actually speaking to) Colette. ‘Of course,’ Carter mused, ‘Colette could no more have written
The Second Sex
than de Beauvoir could have danced naked on a public stage, which precisely defines the limitations of both these great ladies.’
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Carter’s final great creation is a lot closer than either of them to being capable of both.
Wise Children
’s insouciance is near stoic. A book about old ladies is, helplessly, going to be a book about ‘the way of all flesh’. ‘Whence came we? Whither goeth we? I know the answer to the second question, of course. Bound for oblivion, nor leave a wrack behind.’ It’s a limelight novel that knows the dark, that ‘wars are facts we cannot fuck away’. Its insouciance is its response in the face of tragedy, poverty, illegitimacy, hierarchy, and most grave of all, ‘untimely death.’ What to do? ‘We’ll go on singing and dancing until we drop in our tracks, won’t we kids?’ In her critical writings Carter associates lightness with stoicism more than once. She comments on one of the movie stars she was most fascinated by, Louise Brooks, who, in Pabst’s
Pandora’s Box
, ‘typifies the subversive violence inherent in beauty and a light heart.’
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In a book as much about the degeneration game as it is about generation and generations, Dora and Nora, in their seventies, at the fag end of the British empire, go to a broken-down old cinema and see the film of their young selves in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, ‘two batty old tarts with their eyes glued to their own ghosts.’