Elizabeth Smart, Tove Jansson

Two books I have recently been unable to re-read.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, even the title, did it for me in 1978. A literary love poem/novel elevated enough for my own general remove from things then. Elizabeth Smart fell in love with a married poet, bore him four children (he fathered fifteen, by four different women, only one of them his wife) and later wrote this 'profoundly honest, open wound of a book', as Cosmopolitan magazine said.

If you leave a book long enough it transforms; or you do. Angela Carter—I was reading her in 1978 as well—praised it at first then said later it should have been called By Grand Central Station I Tore His Balls Off. It was first published in 1945, the year Angela Carter was born. Maybe this will come into its own again, I thought as I chose it the other night, in dire need of a phoenix book to rise off the shelves and find me transformed.

There was no phoenix. I am not transformed. I am exasperated. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is unreadable from about line two. Everything is Unreadable, even the puffs, the introduction.

I read in the Guardian Weekly that a quarter of the population of Finland had recently turned on their tvs to watch a new animation series about Finn Family Moomintroll. I have only one Moomin book, Moominvalley in November. I'm not good with children's books I didn't know as a child. I read a page or two. I like the titles. I like them on the shelf. You can like a writer for being there and not want to read the books.

Tove Jansson's The Summer Book was a rescue book. Not a children's book but a book about being a child on an island in the Gulf of Finland. I read it while clearing out my father's house after he had died. Tove Jansson had an island, a grandmother, the serenity of untouched moss, at times, and other times its fragility. I am not good with little creatures who have strange names. I am good with the fragility of moss, and other times its serenity.

Angela Carter, Black Venus, The Bloody Chamber

Reviews of a new biography of Angela Carter sent me back to her books, all of which I have, I think, in their Picador/King Penguin/Virago editions of the 1970s and 80s. It wasn't until I'd finished Black Venus and started The Bloody Chamber that I remembered why I'd felt at home with them when they came out; and why I haven't re-read them. Certain books are absorbed by the life into which they fed. They do not teleport. Angela Carter came out of a reading culture I knew — from Baudelaire to fairy stories — and she was older than I was, with a will to shake off any chattels that didn't suit her.  I knew her, or wanted to know her.

His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russian leather. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt entering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to recline on. A lectern, carved like a spread eagle, that held open upon it an edition of Huysmans's Là-bas...

This was a scenario I knew. What happened was secondary.  Standing at the lectern and reading, as interloper, as greedy thief, as innocent. That was as much as I could understand. The bloody chamber, the murdered wives, the gothic gore, were beyond me.

What did I make of the ruby choker that saves our fragile but resilient heroine? How did I wear it in 1979? With defiance, fear, quiet assurance or absolute refusal? Where did I stand, exactly, in my own  life, at what distance from it?  How much mythic could I stomach? How many prototypes? Then? Now?

Angela Carter leaves with more questions than she arrived.