Barbara Cartland, You Is Apocalypse My Heart

Sometime last July I got a glimpse of what it would be like to live a life of leisure, and fuck, if it wasn’t one of the best experiences of my life- if a sugar daddy wants to hook me up with such a life in exchange for sexual favours, I’m not going to say no…

Specifically, I was relaxing in Pennsylvania over the 4th of July weekend, eating- well, virtually everything in sight- and it so happened that everything in sight was fresh (well… except for the seemingly endless supply of chips), simple, delicious food, exactly what you’d feel like eating during a humid summer. I was also privileged with some beautiful company in the form of my precocious niece, my sis, my brother in law, and B; it was a recipe for success. Add to that sleeping whenever we felt like it, chilling on the most comfortable couch imaginable, watching the best Korean drama ever, with the funniest most garbled English subtitles (especially when they were speaking English: ‘You think they were saying “Hello, my name is Jennifer”? Let me translate that from English into… English for you- “Hellos, I am a scissor. I love your toes salt, with good heart!”‘), immersed in gorgeous surrounds and staying right across from a lake that looked like it came straight out of some nostalgic American teen film (it even had one of wooden platform thingies)- it was an experience bordering on the unspeakably sublime. If I had to choose a time in my life to live over and over again, right now, enduring a dreary, cold Melbourne, that would be it. It is also, it seems, a catalyst for an excess of increasingly inflated adjectives.

More significantly, it was the scene of a conversation I wish my memory was good enough to remember verbatim. B and I were sharing a room on the first night, and we were having lots of very ’sleepover’ kinds of moments. Lying on opposite twin beds, probably on our stomachs swinging our legs back and forth (I have no idea if that’s true, I’m trying to advance the teen ’sleepover’ angle here, just go with it)- sharing intimate details and the like, when the conversation turned to romance novels, and B proceeded to tell me in minute, hilarious detail, the convoluted plot of a Barbara Cartland novel she’d read as a cute, young thing. I thought I was going to bust a gut- I was clutching my stomach in pain while struggling to breathe, occasionally trying not to pee my pants, and periodically begging her to stop so I wouldn’t die from laughter. This is no exaggeration. Cartland is that funny.

For the uninitiated, Cartland is beyond explainable: she is a bizzare abberation of humanity, an embarrassing example of femininity, and an unavoidable giant of the romance novel genre. All those words I just wrote show how impossible she is to describe without over doing it, without sniggering. She invites bombast.

In short, she may as well be the origin of every romance writer/novel cliché known to human civilisation, and perhaps the leading proponent of what I’d like to call the “Oh! I don’t want to have sex with you! I’d rather run around saying “no” so often, the hero begins to think that when I say “no!” I really mean, “yes! YES! RAVISH ME! I secretly harbour rape fantasies, and will be grateful when you take me against my will! ” And he’d be right! “No!” (and take note, I really mean yes! take me)” type of romance novel that is now rather archaic.

For all these reasons, Cartland has been the source of much happiness and female bonding in my life. Not only has she provided the above-mentioned conversation, she is also the source of possibly the best Christmas gift I could give to my sisters if I’m ever able to track it down: a dvd copy of a tv movie, starring a very young Helena Bonham Carter, adapted from a Cartland novel: A Hazard of Hearts. Oh.my.lord. So much trashy joy, so much vaseline applied to the hero’s lips (I can only assume to emphasize his already overexaggerated pout) and so much giggling (but also internal girly fantasy fulfillment- for shame) shared between a very young Jen, and now that I think about it, her then young sisters who were around my age when we borrowed it repeatedly from the video store down the road (damn, we should have bought it when the store closed down). Over Christmas we tried to relive the joy with a couple of Mills and Boon adaptation dvds we purchased from JB on a whim… but it just wasn’t the same.

For your reading pleasure, and so perhaps you’ll understand at least in part why Cartland provides so much entertainment, here is an excerpt from a Cartland novel one of my sister’s received from a friend as a joke- Apocalypse of the Heart.

Then the Prince said in a deep voice, “What are you wishing for?”

“I suppose I am wishing for happiness like anyone else would,” Alicia replied after a moment’s pause.

“That is what I want,” the Prince said, “but for me it can never come true.”

“Why not?” Alicia asked. As she looked up at the Prince, the words seemed to focus on her lips.

“I love you,” the Prince delcared. “I love you as I have never loved anyone before, and I know that you are who I have been looking for all my life.”

Alicia’s eyes widened but she did not reply. Then he went on, “I have traveled a great deal and I have seen women I thought were beautiful who attracted me. But I have never seen anyone as lovely and as perfect as you.”

Alicia was listening to him as if she were hypnotized. Her eyes were held by his; it was impossible to look away.

“I love you, I love you,” the Prince said. “I knew it from the first moment I saw you, but I realized last night you were as out of reach as if you were the Goddess Venus.”

Man, I’ve only attempted to read that one novel and I still I love Barbara Cartland, even inspite of her rape narrative tendencies- which I hope can be put down as being products of her time (which, I admit is still disturbing)- and although this post may have sounded quite disparaging, I have a lot of respect for her, if only for her surpremely absurdist, but masterful and entertaining plotting skills. In fact, I got side tracked by Cartland- I was actually intending to write a relatively serious post on blogs and the romance novel- and how they are disparaged as lesser forms of the media, literature and writing in general. Thank Barbara for the existence of this post instead.

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