Recently, a friend read to me some of his favorite passages from FLESH AND THE MIRROR: ESSAYS ON THE ART OF ANGELA CARTER. As I listened, a time and place of the past, around 1987/88, came back to me in a rush: an office in an old house, me on the phone, and the familiar, back-of-the-Penguin Carter face coming in to focus and hovering over the scene. I was remembering a telephone conversation I had, many years ago now, with Angela Carter. I don't know how I could have mislaid that conversation over the years, but I had. I'd changed. When I spoke with Carter, I wanted to write and publish like her, but then I changed.
My many and too elaborate word fantasies about hairy automatons, sacred fruit dropped from translation to Heaven, jewels that bullied and ate children, and Victorian maids hanging, for uncanny love, in moldy gardens were just not catching on with anyone, anywhere. The funny thing was that when I started writing about such things, I had no idea who Angela Carter was. I was just writing in my own way. But every now and then, some one would read and appreciate my tales, and so I was urged to read Carter's BLACK VENUS. It was a bit like catching sight, for the first time, of some one thought to be "the one." Not long after, I made the connection that Carter had co-written the screenplay for what was promoted in the States as a dreadful werewolf film but turned out to be THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, any thing but awful and, still, one of my favorite fantasy films. So now I was reading Carter along with others in somewhat similar universes, and I kept watching and writing and writing hoping it would mean some thing, knowing it was a long shot.
Then I wrote a letter which, like Fenby to Delius, took me to New York and a circle of internationally-renowned, avant-garde musicians and composers in orbit around a concert pianist with whom I had a mildly torturing, intimate relationship. Not being an internationally-renowned, avant-garde musician, I mostly prepared dinners and served those who were; turned pages for him; catalogued compositions by Morton Feldman and Arvo Part; and tried to put order to the personal phone book exploding with the contact information of Anthony Burgess, Diamanda Galas, Edward Gorey, Virgil Thompson, et al.
Taking a break from the glamor of it all, and with Village Voice opened before me, I read that Angela Carter was going to read from her novel LOVE, recently reissued, in a Greenwich Village bookstore on Tuesday. The problem: it was Tuesday, I was in Toronto, and she was reading just as I was reading about her reading. The added salt in the wound was noting that Carter was ending a residency at SUNY Somewhere. So much for meeting her, studying under her, plumbing her imagination, sharing laughs with her about about Sade and Bataille and marzipan Neuschwantstein's over cognacs, perhaps, cigars--I'd have smoked a cigar for Angela Carter.
That just wasn't how it played out. Now I'm mildly surprised that I even managed to figure out how to track down her phone number and call her. Her contact information didn't follow John Cage's in the prized personal phone book; but the Village book store gave it to me, and I was contacting SUNY, and, heart in throat, I was calling Angela Carter after find a florist who sold tuberose in case, should my fantasy of how things would play out become real, I'd be invited 'round for cognac. Not that the tuberose was her flower of choice, but in my purple-prose colored world, tuberoses just seemed so right for Angela Carter. I just needed to have the lovely little chat, set a lovely date, and be on my lovely way.
...
(from memory, so a bit more or less than the conversation really was)
The phone is ringing, it's answered, and a voice asks, "Hello?"
"Hello! May I speak with Angela Carter?"
"She's speaking."
"Where?"
"Here, on the phone, to you [moron]."
"Uh, um, er, um...hello, thank you for answering."
"You're welcome. And who is this?"
"This is Keith DeWeese."
"What can I do for you?"
"Well, Ms. Carter, I was just very upset that I missed your reading in the Village, and, well, I know I'm being a silly 'fan,' but I just wanted to talk to you. Your work inspires me, and I just wanted to say hello and thank you."
"Oh, that's delightful. So what inspires you?"
"Well, your choice of words, your subject matter--fairy tales, legends, folklore, Louise Brooks, Japan!"
"You like Louise Brooks, do you?"
"Yes, she's incredible."
"Who else do you like?"
"Well, I'm really in to Musidora these days. Irma Vep."
"Oh yes! Musidora. She's been on my mind, too, lately. She pops up in unique places, doesn't she?"
I'm laughing now, relaxed, "Yes, she does! I'm so glad she's on your mind. Do you think you'll write about her?"
"She's on my mind. I'm trying to see THE VAMPIRES, but I keep missing it. Have you seen it?"
"No! I keep trying, too, but it's just so hard to find."
"And I don't know if I could really follow it for so many hours. I've seen parts of it though, enough to tantalize me."
The rest of the conversation was more of the "Have you read...?" "Did you know...?" "Oh no! He didn't say that!" variety. At the end, she took my address, and, true to her word, within a few days, I received a note from her with a signed copy of LOVE. Her engagement at SUNY complete, she left for England the following week. So the delivery of tuberoses didn't work out as hoped, though I'd asked if she liked them, and she said, "Oh, yes, but over-powering in a closed room," which I think was said to humor me. As for LOVE, I read it until I came to love it.
Caustic as she could be, Angela Carter was warm, gracious, far kinder than I deserved. Under the circumstances--you know, absolute dolt calling Angela Carter out of the blue and burbling on about Erzebet Bathory and Louis Feuillade--it all smacks of a stalker tale now, but it wasn't; after all, she sent me LOVE.
A few years after that, the 'mildly torturing, intimate relationship' with the pianist ended badly in Norway and with a John Cage opera's interdeterminancy ricocheting all around us. By 1993, the pianist, Angela Carter, and John Cage were dead.
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