How a feminist anthology taught me that outsiders can pull together
This article is more than 9 years old
Mark Haddon
Thursday 20 July 2015
I grew up on a diet of Carry On films, Benny Hill and my parents’ Daily Telegraph. The Spare Rib Reader helped me articulate an unease that I had felt for as long as I could remember
The book that changed me: falling for Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage
In this series, writers nominate a book that changed their life – or at least their thinking.
I first read Eve Babitz at the tail end of the 20th century, holed up in the rumpus room of my parent’s house in north suburban Brisbane in exile from my bad behaviour on the Gold Coast.
I’d found Eve by accident, trawling through all the literature I could find written about Los Angeles. I was doing a PhD, trying to write a book and drawing connections between her dream city and my own California in miniature, the GC.
Dorothy Parker showed me that it was possible to live the life I wanted
Finding her 1926 work Enough Rope when I was schoolgirl in 1950s Ireland opened the door to a world beyond domesticity
Mary Kenny
Friday 2 August 2013
They had a somewhat restricted view in Sandymount, Dublin 4 of what was suitable reading for a schoolgirl in the late 1950s: my uncle had confiscated an Agatha Christie mystery from me, pronouncing the subject of murder to be "squalid" and "disedifying" for the tender consciences of a young lady. Actually, I had come upon reading-matter that was much more subversive and this other book signalled to me, soul to soul.
Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer
This article is more than 7 years old
His 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain made clear that a black writer must write the best work they can, while refusing to be defined by other people's racial agendas
Top 10 literary biographies
Gary Younge
Thu 1 August 2013
O
ne of my first columns on these pages didn't make it into the paper. I'd written about the Nato bombing of Bosnia and the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. "We have people who can write about Bosnia," he said. "Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this."
Door into the Dark opened the portals to a different future
‘I have only to see Door into the Dark sitting on my bookshelves to remember the feeling that a locked-up door in my life had suddenly swung open,’ says Andrew Motion
How the ‘slap and squelch’ of Seamus Heaney’s poems propelled me into verse
Andrew Motion
Sun 17 Aug 2014
W
hen I was a child, there were two books of poetry in the whirligig at home: a collected Tennyson that had once been given to my great-grandmother by my great-grandfather, and a Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke which my mother had won as a school prize. Nobody read them. Nobody read anything much. They preferred the life outdoors. Then I began doing English A-level, and was taught for the first time by Peter Way, who walked straight into my head and turned the lights on. Within a few weeks my old life seemed to have fallen away (though not the subjects it contained), and all I wanted to do was to write and read poems.
Every book I have read has influenced my life, but a book that changed my future was Hopscotch by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar.
I was 15 years old when I found Hopscotch in my house library and I was drawn to open it by the chalk hopscotch on its cover. Wondering what a book with that name could be about, l discovered that it could be read in two different ways. One, starting at chapter one and finishing in chapter 57. Or the other starting at chapter 73 and following the order shown at the end of every chapter. Now I was intrigued.
The following year I couldn’t stop reading its pages. Even acquiring the habits of the characters. Like Horacio’s superstition that you have to lift an object that falls to the floor immediately before a person whose name starts with the first letter of the object suffers a misfortune. Or trying to be like La Maga, absorbed and distracted.
Half of Hopscotch is in Paris, a city that I had never been to or even dreamed of. After reading this book I knew I had to go there and discover the bohemian Paris depicted by Cortázar.
Two years later, after I finished high school, I was on a twelve-hour flight from my home country Colombia to France with the aim of walking through the same bridges and boulevards where Horacio and La Maga loved and lost each other.
Angela Carter's exploration of life in a female body taught me to be comfortable in my own
I was 15 and in the bottom set for most subjects at school. The Magic Toyshop changed everything
Evie Wyld Monday 8 June 2020
T
he Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter was the first book I read at school that seemed to make some kind sense of my life. I was 15, and in the bottom set for every class other than art, where I painted very badly and was praised a disproportionate amount for my terrible, angsty self-portraits; in most of which I appeared bald for some reason.
As the weakest student of every bottom set – quite an accomplishment – I couldn’t spell and my handwriting bordered on illegible. From my point of view, there was a great worthiness about most of the books we studied, a dusty maleness, and it felt like there was nothing so important as a man of about 57 who was very wise and sure of himself.
Reading the first page of The Magic Toyshop was revelatory. My bad, bald self-portraits began to make sense. I was trying on other skins, attempting to fit comfortably into my own. The story’s protagonist, Melanie, discovers her own body at the age of 15 in a way that completely scandalised our English class – I remember one girl teasing another, asking if she’d ever looked at herself naked in the mirror – an impossible thing to answer without complete ridicule and mortification.
And there was Melanie, setting herself up, between masturbating, to look like Lautrec’s models, “legs apart with a basin of water on the floor”. I remember how outrageous it felt to read about a young woman looking at her own body in a mirror, admiring it. The next thing Melanie did was put into words the dreadful feeling of being assessed by a man – the first few times it happens and you have nothing to compare it to: how magnetic it feels, and how dangerous.
“It was as if he had put on the quality of maleness, like a flamboyant cloak. He was a tawny lion poised for the kill – and was she the prey? She remembered the lover made up out of books and poems she had dreamed of all summer; he crumpled like the paper he was made of before this insolent offhand terrifying maleness, filling the room with its reek. She hated it but could not take her eyes off him.”
What a relief when her younger siblings are taken away from Melanie and she is freed of the responsibilities of being “a little mother”.
Alongside the bad portraits, I’d been writing short stories by then for a couple of years, about hideously fantastical things – people who lived inside their own minds under bridges because that was more beautiful than reality, or the setting of one’s self on fire, because of a general sense of ennui and the batteries in one’s Walkman running out. I still have the little booklet of stories I made back then. The writing is desperate to seem serious, to seem huge and wise like the old men we read at school.
It is often the magical, fabular aspects of Carter’s stories that people focus on, but in The Magic Toyshop I responded to the way she blended this with a clear-eyed realism about what it was to live in a female body. Carter seemed to be saying something about female experience, that it had a different kind of relationship to reality than those breezy male characters I had previously met, confident in their role as subject and point of view. Melanie becomes aware of her body and sexuality as part of a process of literal discovery in which she compares it to America. Rereading this book, I am struck by this metaphor, the female body as colonised land, site of projected meaning, violence and plunder.
In a novel so brilliantly conjured from splayed toothbrush heads, mustard-and-cress sandwiches and prawn shells, bread loaves and cutlery, brickwork and yellow household soap, the female body is both one more familiar object and at the same time something strange and troubling. Melanie is only able to understand her body by turning it into another kind of object, but in doing so she understands this is a power. As a young girl experiencing that moment when your body is both the vessel for your self but suddenly, as if overnight, also a thing, a collection of objects for men to look at, assess, interpret and desire, Carter’s story seemed to speak directly to my life. That this was an experience from which art could be made felt like someone had opened a door somewhere.
My English teacher, sensing a student pricking up her ears for the first time, took me one Saturday to hear Carmen Callil, Carter’s best friend and editor, talk. She told us that “Angie” couldn’t spell. That was perhaps the most encouraging thing I’d heard from anybody, that the gridlines of schoolwork didn’t mark the limits of ability. In her introduction to the 1981 edition, Callil writes that “all over the world are literary incendiary bombs planted by Angela, and in Britain, young writers whom she encouraged”.
Encouraged is an interesting word that has become gentler in the way it is commonly used. But Callil was no doubt using it in the literal sense, of Carter giving writers the courage to write. I know that had I not read The Magic Toyshop at that point in my life, I would never have felt that my sort of experiences deserved to be written about at all.
Evie Wyld is a writer and the author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice; All the Birds, Singing; and Everything is Teeth. Her most recent book is The Bass Rock
The Picture of Dorian Gray made me forever suspicious of the self-righteous
Oscar Wilde’s only novel offers a horrible vision of the power and frailty of self-delusion
Deborah Orr
Thursday 6 Augus 2015
I
have good reason for remembering the first time I read The Picture of Dorian Gray. Its conceit was captivating, in more ways than one. Gray unwittingly makes a Faustian pact whereby his own youthful beauty remains unblemished, while a portrait he hides in an attic shows the ravages visited on his face and body by his ugly character.
It was a Friday afternoon in the summer of 1984, and I sat in the living room of my flat in Edinburgh, absolutely gripped. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish it in a single sitting, as I really, really wanted to. My friend Eileen was coming to stay for the weekend, she’d be arriving in the early evening, and I knew that I didn’t quite have the time. But the appointed hour came and went, and she didn’t show. So I carried on reading.
Deborah Orr
Minutes after I’d finished the novel, Eileen turned up, explaining that she was late because she’d been early. Rather than waiting at the coach station, she’d gone to the library, where she got so mesmerised by a book that she’d missed the bus. She’d had to leave this great book behind, but she was desperate to get another copy and carry on.That was quite funny, I told her, because I’d been thrilled that she was late, having been reading a compelling book myself. She should read my book, I insisted, offering it to her enthusiastically. Eileen stared at me, eyes wide, mouth open, shocked, suspicious, unguarded, like a certain portrait in a certain attic, stripped of its social mask, struggling to contain sheer reaction. I stared back. I thought she was about to have a seizure of some kind.
Oscar Wilde
“That’s it,” she gasped, holding her hands out towards this neat Penguin paperback without quite committing to touching it. “That’s the book I was reading.” The coincidence is filed, for both of us, under: Totally Weird Moments.
Maybe I’d have forgotten the book, had it not become a precious artefact of serendipity-in-friendship, one we enjoy dusting off every few years, just to relive the pleasure of being a couple of suggestible 20-year-olds in the throes of a mild hysteria. For us, it represents an unbreakable bond, as if sharing your whole adult life isn’t bond enough.
Angela Lansbury in the 1945 film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/Rex Features
For me, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not just a clever supernatural melodrama, but also a profound text, a horrible vision of the power and frailty of human self-delusion. It’s not profound in the way Wilde intended, I don’t think. At that time, in 1890, he believed that beauty was everything. Yet his only novel is more persuasive as a tract asserting that beauty is nothing. The inversion is all the more touching, all the more upsetting, because – had Wilde understood and heeded the insights of his own story – he surely would not have delivered himself up to his own destruction with the reckless hypocrisy that he did.
It seems wrong, casting Wilde as the author of his own misfortune. He is now seen so religiously as a martyr to homophobia that it’s almost forgotten that it was this gay man himself who started legal action against the Marquess of Queensberry, declaring it libellous to suggest he was a “sodomite”.
The pivotal moment in Dorian Gray is when Dorian, having done some charity work out of alarm at the unflattering cast that hedonism has etched on his portrait’s face, visits the attic to see how his good deeds have improved his expression. Instead, he sees an ugly sneer of hypocrisy despoiling his perfection all the more. It’s made me eternally suspicious of the self-righteous, which is not a good thing, on the whole. But it makes me all the more sad for Wilde, who knew how hypocrisy could ravage a man’s self-image, but chose to protect his public image instead.
My Wilde binge didn’t start and end in that one day. I carried on that summer reading everything he wrote and everything I could find that had been written about him. It was an escape, a relief, an unjust victimhood that could be understood more impartially because it had no personal parallel at all with me.
At that time I was furious about class discrimination, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike, all that. The fury was made worse by the fact that I’d gone to a posh university, the first in my family, and discovered – oh woe, oh confusion – that privileged people quite often seemed friendly, interesting, generous and likable.
It was from these people that I first learned properly about feminism, which until then had been something on the telly called “women’s lib”, which my mother said was nonsense. But it seemed weird, taking lessons about oppression from these young women who’d had more opportunities in life than pretty much every male I’d ever known until I fell in with their crowd.Wilde, of course, had been a highly privileged man himself, privileged in background, education, intelligence and talent. None of which had stopped him from dying at the age of 46, broken and in exile. I became fascinated by gay rights, a proper fag-hag. Watching homophobia being exposed as a shameful weapon wielded by bullies and cowards has been a joy in my life, not because I think it has any primacy over other prejudices, but because it seemed more easily isolated and therefore more easily legislated against. I think recent history has borne this out. So, when the absolutely necessary railing against the “dead, white males” gained currency, I thought, “Up to a point, but … Oscar.”
Oscar Wilde
Decades later, when I heard about intersectionality, I simply thought: “Yup, that’s what’s been missing from this stuff all along.” Gay rights were the low-hanging fruits of anti-discrimination. So to speak. The rest is much harder, but at least there’s an example that offers room for optimism. Perhaps.
I still think it’s too formulaic, the compiling of league tables of victimhood. The sense that you get from the most absurd quarters is that their own personal sense of victimhood is the one that, once sorted, will liberate the world. Many people chose identity politics over socialism in the 1980s, maybe just because these were positive changes that seemed possible, at a time when the tide surged against a universal egalitarianism. I know that Dorian Gray changed me. But there’s no portrait in my attic, so I don’t know whether it changed me for the better or for the worse, just as I don’t know when or if the rising tide of inequality will ever turn again.
