Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds
In 1973, Christopher Frayling, then a young university lecturer, and the novelist Angela Carter, petitioned Bath City Council to erect a plaque in honour of author Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein whilst living in the city. The letter of rejection was swift in coming and contained the rather curt observation that the pair’s idea had “more to do with Hollywood than it did with Bath.”
Frayling – these days a Knight of the Realm and every inch the rumpled academic – is talking at the Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds about his close friendship with Carter – who died prematurely aged 51 twenty five years ago – by way of introduction to a screening of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, a film with deeply felt resonances for them both. The friendship is also partly the subject of his book, Inside the Bloody Chamber, published in 2015.
Frayling is an engaging speaker. The tales of his adventures with Carter – like the one described above – fix her as wonderfully mischievous and contrarian. He describes her as ‘rough at the edges – not a plaster saint.’ She was rich in her contradictions. She could be ‘puritanical’ despite her atheism, he says, when asked about Carter’s spiritual beliefs – “more Jacobean than Shakespearean,” he has stated elsewhere – and she was nobody’s poster girl as feminists sometimes found to their cost. “She was much more independent-minded than the traditional feminist of her time,” observed writer Marina Warner speaking in 2012.
Between 1972 and 1976, Carter – still yet to create the darkly unassailable works that would single her out as a unique interpreter of the contemporary Gothic – was living a frugal existence (“healthily cold” she quipped) as a writer in Bath. It was there she met Frayling. The two bonded over Hammer horror movies and a shared guilty pleasure in reading stories about vampires and werewolves. Among English academics at the time, such predilections were marginal: the canon as decreed by the venerable F R Leavis – what Carter dismissed as the “eat your greens school of English Literature” – held sway. Such derisory fluff as Gothic literature and science fiction – both dear to her heart – were ‘side-lined’.
Carter, of course, would change all that, so much so that today university courses on the subject have grown exponentially. Frayling’s ostensible contribution was to give Carter access to his library of books about vampirism, including Gabriel Ronay’s The Dracula Myth which had Carter riffing on the theme of ‘Good Food Guides for vampires.’ For a while, the two were inseparable. A thinly disguised Frayling turns up as ‘Hero’ in Carter’s short story The Lady in the House of Love. She teasingly transposes his real life journey through Ceaușescu’s Romania researching local legends, to a Hammer backlot Transylvania, where he is saved from a vampire’s bite only by his possessing a singular lack of imagination.
This playfully subversive diminution of the world carried through everything she did. Carter was an assiduous keeper of notebooks, says Frayling: “You had to be careful what you said around her.” A visit to the cinema to see Nosferatu, F W Murnau’s unsettling Expressionist retelling of Dracula, yielded this hilariously Freudian sketch: “Nosferatu – his fingers like roots, tuberous fingers, the head like a phallus, with one eye blacked out.” Frayling points out that Murnau’s is the only depiction that gets right Dracula’s ‘rodent-like teeth.’ More significant is the intertitle Carter copied down verbatim from the film: ‘And when he had crossed over the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.’ Frayling tells us it was a line beloved of the Surrealists – and now it belonged to her.
Her notebooks hold the key to how Carter became the author of such richly transgressive Gothic narratives. They contain her invocations of de Sade (she held firm to his assertion that ‘art is the perfect subversion’) and Perrault – Carter worked on new translations of both during her residency in Bath. The notebooks also distil what she called her ‘image clusters.’ These drew heavy inspiration from art (Fusili’s depiction of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), opera (notably Von Weber’s The Marksman) philosophy (Rousseau) and film (tonight’s La Belle et la Bête). More potent is the repeated reference to dreams and dreaming: Carter’s affinity with Cocteau would seem obvious enough, though it is equally likely that she was cognisant of Bunuel’s love for dreams ‘even when they’re nightmares, which is usually the case’.
The greater part of The Bloody Chamber would not be completed until Carter had left Bath behind to take up a position as writer in residence at Sheffield University, but its seeds were sown amidst Georgian splendour. She was a consummate appropriator, says Frayling, and it is impossible to read her vivid reworking of folktale mythology without being constantly confronted by the writer’s myriad obsessions. The Bloody Chamber’s redemptive undercurrent of psycho-sexual bad blood is suffused with Carter’s own brand of Pagan humanism. (Another dark convergence has Carter’s admiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in bed with underground filmmaker and occultist bad boy Kenneth Anger, who had a minor role in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 Hollywood adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.)
Viewing Cocteau’s film after Frayling’s hour-long preamble is to suddenly see it with fresh eyes. Frayling speaks of its magic as if it still catches him by surprise. Cocteau’s lush visuals have the inescapable dream logic found in Carter’s best writing. She especially loved the sequence where Belle – played by Josette Day as ‘luminous and occasionally feisty’ – enters the enchanted castle. (Frayling treats us to this sequence to whet our appetites.) Such tropes as punctuate Carter’s writing in The Bloody Chamber – dreams nestled within dreams, mirrors, automata, the beast within – engender its cloyingly subversive darkness, and open up “a portal to the magic world of childhood.” This, Frayling suggests, is what his friend Angela Carter truly took away from watching La Belle et la Bête. He ends by speaking ‘four truly magic words, childhood’s ‘Open Sesame’: Once upon a time…’
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