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Angela Carter: Shaking a Leg
by R.P. Infantino

    In reading Angela Carter’s combination autobiography, essays, reviews, and criticisms in Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings (Penguin, 1997), I’ve come to the realization that Angela Carter is one smart bird (she being British and all). This claim is easily made accordingly: I barely understand a thing she writes. Nevertheless, I read with such glee her words I scarcely comprehend. While reading her works, I arm myself with a dictionary, an almanac, a primer to mythology, an atlas, the New York Times Guide to Reference Material, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, just to figure out what the heck Angela Carter is talking about, she’s such a smart bird.

    Here’s Angela Carter on director G.W. Pabst and actress Louise Brooks: “At the core of the didactic Pabst’s abstract melodrama of bourgeois hypocrisy is the American Brooks’s exhibition of lyrical naturalism.” Or in describing her native England, she writes: “A feverish hysterical glamour plays like summer lightning about certain of the arteries of sixties’ consciousness, although the King’s Road has long gone the way of Carnaby Street towards an ultimate apotheosis in candy floss and Kiss Me Kwik hats, while the petals drop remorselessly from the full-blown Gate,” to which I reply, “Huh?” I feel the same toward Angela Carter’s writing as she feels toward theoretical physics: “It has always seemed to be pure poetry, partly because I don’t understand it.” Oh, how I wish I could write as smart (smartly?) as Angela Carter, so smart that hardly anyone understands me.

    But read her I do, with zeal. I’ve become captivated by her eclectic writings, from Bob Dylan, Richard Wagner, Jazz, to Japan, England, Amerika (Carter’s spelling from a Franz Kafka novel), to the Brothers Grimm, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, to Linda Lovelace, vegetarians (talk about an odd coupling), to professional wrestling, the punk movement, Josephine Baker, to Hollywood, television (another contradictory pair), and a myriad of topics I have yet to read as it’ll be years before I finish this 608 page book.

    Of the 145 essays in Shaking a Leg, I’ve read many (okay, four). That’s not much in one week’s time considering each piece is barely five or six pages, but in researching words and phrases—in attempting to understand her all—one essay is equivalent to a scientific journal. I’m not as smart a bird as Angela Carter.

    The stamp-sized photo of Angela Carter that adorns the back of her book is the only picture I’ve seen of her. By general standards, she would be deemed average-looking, not worthy of a second glance (some might say even a first glance). In reading more of her writings, however, I have fallen for her intelligence, her wit, her forceful opinion, her domineering voice, her stylistic persona. There’s an overall beauty to one you admire for their intelligence. Suddenly, I have found this, at first glance, drab woman to be wholly attractive, inside and out. I fell for Angela Carter in toto: her overly high cheekbones, her wind-blown cotton-candy hair, and her Hubble telescope-like glasses. Man, what a woman.

    It seems famed author Henry James felt the same of George Eliot when he wrote: “She [George Eliot] is magnificently ugly. She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth. Now, in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind so that you end as I ended, falling in love with her.” So it seems the great Henry James and I share that similarity. I can’t say we’re also writers on the same level; he elevates the language, I bungle it.

    Angela Carter loves books and reading as much as Dante loved Beatrice. More references to exotic literature than I have ever seen. I’m sure she’s making many up. In checking the aforementioned reference material, however, there they are. How could she know so much? How could she have time to read everything? One clue is her feeling toward television: “We were the only family in my class at school who didn’t have a television set. [My parents] got one at last, when my father retired, ostensibly so that he could watch the news; things went downhill after that.” Or, “The more I watch television, the more I wonder what it’s for.” Also, “…the essential oddness of television as a medium, the sense of uninvolved participation, of being there and doing nothing.”And a host of other comments that demean television with a vengeance. Now there’s a woman after my own heart as once I realized that television was a champion time-waster (as Edison felt of motion pictures), I promptly unplugged it and stored it in the closet.

    The first section of Shaking a Leg is categorized as Self and it contains seven autobiographical essays on Angela Carter’s life that read less like the Hollywood-style narcissistic tripe and more like a novel. Her style is reminiscent of Nabokov who also wrote biographies as if peopled with fictional characters. His Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of the best true-life fictional stories that reads like a mystery (Of course, numbskull that I am, Nabokov’s book is a novel and not a biography as I later found out - that's how good he is). Angela Carter, as far as I can tell, admired Nabokov (after all, her essay on his work is so intelligently written, I barely understand it). Both writers have a strong, definite style of writing. What Angela Carter writes must be true, she writes with such authority. This stems from her maternal grandmother who, Carter writes, was a “woman of such physical and spiritual heaviness, she might have been born with a greater degree of gravity than most people…every word and gesture of hers displayed a natural dominance, a native savagery, and I am very grateful for all that now….” In reading Angela Carter’s work, one can feel her grandmother’s dominance, and, if dead against someone or something, her savagery as well. On Joan Collins’s autobiography, Carter mercilessly writes, “…Joan Collins is the pits. Just the pits…she penned her sniggering memoirs in order to give her drecky movies an extra touch of notoriety…[her style] is copywriter’s kitsch…[she] made a number of movies which contributed to the decline of the motion picture industry….” Whew! Poor Joan Collins. She must be rolling over in her grave—and she’s not even dead yet.

    So give Angela Carter’s Shaking a Leg a try, as long as you have IBM’s Summit computer in your corner for reference, she’s such a smart bird.

Copyright © 2023 by R.P. Infantino